Direava, a Japanese company, has won an innovation prize at CEATEC AWARD 2026 for a generative AI model that reads endoscopic surgery video and describes what is happening in words. NEDO, the national R&D agency that runs the GENIAC programme with the Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry, announced the award on 6 October 2026.
What the model does
The system, called Surgical VLM, analyses endoscopic video and combines the objects in the surgical field, the actions being performed and the surgical knowledge behind them into language. NEDO's release says earlier surgical AI mostly acted as the "eyes", recognising organs, vessels and nerves, whereas this model can also interpret the situation. Direava calls it the first surgery-specific generative AI foundation model in Japan.
Surgeons wrote the training data themselves, structured into four categories: object, action, reason and next step. Direava then fine-tuned a large Japanese-language multimodal model on it.
The numbers, and who set the test
No evaluation standard exists for this field, so Direava built its own benchmark, Surgical-VLM Bench, in which specialist surgeons grade outputs on a five-point scale. In a real-time trial in a university hospital operating room, the model scored 84.7% for anatomical accuracy and 82.9% for clinical usefulness, above 80% on both. The release gives no sample size and no comparison model. The scores come from the developer's own framework, not an external standard.
From training tool to the operating table
Direava's plan, in the release's words, is to start with surgical education, offering the service to young surgeons, medical students and regional core hospitals. It is considering intraoperative information and confirmation support later, after the necessary pharmaceutical regulatory procedures, and then partial automation. The release cites forecasts that gastroenterological surgeons will roughly halve over the next 20 years and that Japan will be about 5,000 doctors short for cancer surgery by 2040.
The research ran under GENIAC, the generative AI development programme run by NEDO and the Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry, from August 2025. Direava is also developing a surgical future-prediction model for surgical safety under a GENIAC project NEDO announced in June 2026.
NEDO will show the work at its booth at CEATEC 2026, held at Makuhari Messe from 13 to 16 October.