ORena SAVE FOCUS is a joint initiative of the Wellcome Leap SAVE program and the ORena initiative of the DKFZ Intelligent Medical Systems (IMSY) lab, co-sponsored by Helmholtz Imaging.
The SAVE program is a US $50 million research and innovation initiative launched by Wellcome Leap, a nonprofit aimed at accelerating breakthroughs in global human health. SAVE stands for Surgery: Assess, Validate, Expand and focuses on addressing critical challenges in global surgical care. It is led by Prof. Thomas G. Weiser, clinical coordinator of the SAVE FOCUS challenge.
Helmholtz Imaging is an interdisciplinary platform of the Helmholtz Association of German Research Centres designed to unlock the scientific potential of imaging data and methods across all disciplines and scales of research. It serves as a central hub for expertise, tools, funding, and collaboration in imaging science. Within this framework, the DKFZ IMSY lab leads the benchmarking activities, driving the development of standards and evaluation strategies for imaging methods.
ORena is an umbrella framework for surgical AI competitions designed specifically for Operating Room challenges. It provides standardized benchmarks, curated datasets, and community leaderboards to drive progress on AI systems that can support real clinical workflows. SAVE FOCUS is the inaugural challenge, with future editions planned to address other critical problems in surgical safety and quality assurance.
Amazon Web Services (AWS) sponsors the compute for validating participating teams’ submissions.
