At Surgical Data Science Collective (SDSC), we work closely with our partners to ensure that our Surgical Video Platform (SVP) supports their goals in a meaningful and practical way. When our partners come to us with new ideas or specific research needs, we listen – and we move quickly. Our collaboration with the University of Oklahoma (OU) Department of Neurosurgery is a great example of how direct feedback from researchers can lead to impactful product development in a matter of days.
A Natural Collaboration Built on Shared Vision
Our partnership with OU started early on in SDSC’s journey, built on a shared vision of leveraging surgical video to advance both clinical research and surgical education. Researchers at OU, such as Dr. Christopher Graffeo, were already generating valuable surgical footage, and our platform offered them a way to store, organize, and extract deep, meaningful data from it.
Their research is primarily focused on the surgical removal of schwannomas, a type of nerve sheath tumor that usually arises from a single fascicle (bundle) within the main nerve, and displaces the rest. They’re asking: can different approaches to the same procedure yield different clinical outcomes? It’s a complex study – one that relies heavily on surgical video being well-organized and tagged by approach. This is where our engineering team at SDSC stepped in.
Our Rapid Response to OU’s Request
To support OU’s research, we needed to give them a way to quickly and clearly sort through multiple surgeries based on very specific parameters. The solution? Metadata tabs.
Imagine you’ve got 30 surgeries in your library. Maybe they’re yours, or maybe they’ve been shared with you. They’ve got a wide range of tags, multiple procedure names, and it can be tough to find exactly what you’re looking for. Our new metadata tagging and filtering system changes that. Now, users can easily tag procedures, apply filters, and instantly access only the videos relevant to their work. It’s a powerful tool, and it only took us a week and a half to build.
A Cross-Team Effort
The process of getting metadata tabs from concept to production was a smooth and tightly run operation. One of our Software Engineers, Andrew Rama, developed the feature independently with the support of our dedicated Quality Assurance (QA) team. Our QA process is exceptionally robust, as every update to the SVP goes through development, staging, and production environments with a full suite of manual, written, and automated tests. This ensures that nothing breaks, and that every feature is ready for real-world use from day one.
The coordination between our Engineers, QA specialists, and our Director of Product, Dor Spitzer, was a true cross-team effort – exemplifying how SDSC responds when our partners bring us an idea that can benefit the broader surgical community.
Built for OU, Designed for Everyone
One of the most exciting aspects of this collaboration is how scalable the solution is. Metadata tabs weren’t built solely for OU – they were built with everyone in mind. From the start, we designed the feature to work flexibly across use cases and to grow with the platform. As more surgeons and researchers join SVP, the power of these metadata tabs only increases. The more content you have, the more useful this system becomes.
Tags can be created by any user, and while they remain private until a video is shared, once that happens the tags are visible to collaborators – enhancing the collective value of the platform.
Building the Future, One Request at a Time
This partnership with OU has also shaped how we think about our product roadmap. While we plan our development cycles several months ahead, we intentionally leave room to be flexible. When an opportunity like this arises – where a single request could benefit an entire community – we prioritize it. That’s how metadata tabs got fast-tracked, and it’s how future innovations will continue to emerge from the needs of our users.
This collaboration isn’t just a case study in good software development – it’s a model for how academic institutions and SDSC can work together to push the boundaries of surgical science. If you’re a researcher or clinician with a unique need from our SVP, don’t hesitate to reach out. We’re listening, and we’re ready to build!
