Why this one matters
The same operation, by five different surgeons, produces five different outcomes.
That variability is one of the largest causes of poor outcomes in surgery anywhere in the world. XRlabs exists to fix it, and the way you fix it is computer vision.
Their founder trained as a neurosurgeon and walked into the operating theatre to find technology that had barely moved in twenty years. Surgical navigation with the same underlying tech it had two decades ago, a better interface bolted on top. Five screens. Models trained only on the robots that made them.
So he left and started building a surgical foundation model: perception that has seen millions of hours of operating, trained from the surgeon's point of view rather than a machine's. Get that right and you can put a copilot into theatres worldwide, and start closing the gap on the hundreds of millions of operations that never happen at all.
Almost every hard problem they have turns out to be a computer vision problem. There are very few people in the UK or Europe working on them.
That is why this day exists. For one Sunday, their data, their stack and their engineering team are open to twenty people who want to try.
Who is behind it
Leaders in industry.
Real-time AI perception for live surgery, founded by a practising neurosurgeon and running under some of the hardest latency constraints in the industry. Their office. Their data. Their engineers building beside you all day.
Hardware and compute for the day, a walkthrough from their team, and the headline hardware that goes home with whoever wins.
The deep-tech fund backing XRlabs, in the room and watching. Alongside Oxford Seed Fund.
4,200 founders, builders and researchers across Oxford, Cambridge and Imperial. 237 startups through our Challenge last year; finalists have raised over £45m.
The task
Real-time tool differentiation, on proprietary surgical video.
You will train and deploy a model that tells surgical instruments apart in live footage, running on NVIDIA hardware provided on the day. The dataset is XRlabs' own. The specifics land at 11:20 on the 25th, but you know now exactly what you are training for.
Judged on what works
Performance against a hidden test set, false positives and false negatives, with weight for efficiency inside the per-frame budget, your presentation, and whether your work runs again tomorrow.
Built in pairs
Teams of two, formed on the day. Five XRlabs engineers build alongside you, not over your shoulder. That is the part you will remember.
Prepare if you want
Warm up on any open dataset beforehand and bring it with you. A head start on your tooling is fair game. The problem itself lands on the day.
The day
Sunday 25 October
Five hours of build time. Brunch on arrival, pizza at three, drinks once the presentations are done. All on us.
Prizes
What you can walk out with.
+ £1,000
Announced with NVIDIA, and handed over that night.
Every finalist, win or not.
Interested or curious about working in surgical AI? Let us know and we'll try to connect you to people in the team.
Who this is for
Computer vision buffs, wherever you currently sit.
Students and researchers
Oxford, Cambridge, Imperial and beyond. Maths, physics, engineering, stats, life sciences, the department matters far less than the work.
Devs and builders
Already at a lab or a startup, or building on your own. No qualifying task, no homework, and applying takes five minutes.
Anyone who has shipped
A repo, a paper, a competition placing, a thing you built at 2am. Show us, and that is the application.
Apply
Five minutes, and you're in the pile.
We review as applications arrive and send invitations continuously.
Show us something
A GitHub or Scholar profile, and one thing you have built, linked or shown.
We read it
Screened by Oxbridge AIx and the XRlabs engineering team together.
You get an answer
Usually within days. Twenty places, and we hold a handful back for late arrivals worth making room for.
Questions
Before you ask.
Do I need a medical or surgical background?
No. This is a computer vision problem that happens to live in an operating theatre. Everything you need to know about the surgery is explained on the day, and XRlabs engineers are in the room with you throughout.
Do I need to bring a team?
Come alone or as a team, invite friends! Teams of two are finalised on the day.
Do I need my own hardware?
Bring a laptop and a charger. Compute and the accelerated hardware are provided by NVIDIA on the day.
Can I work on it beforehand?
Yes, and we would rather you did. Warm up on any open dataset and bring your scaffolding with you. The task itself uses XRlabs' data and is revealed on the 25th, so preparation buys a head start on tooling, not on the answer.
Who owns what I build?
You do. You keep the IP in your own work.
I'm not at Oxford, Cambridge or Imperial.
Apply anyway. The room is picked on ability, and previous winners have come from outside those three. You might meet your future co-founder or bestie!
Is there a cost?
None. Food, snacks and drinks are on us all day.
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