Shahnawaz Ahmed
Dr. Shahnawaz Ahmed is an Indian-origin computer vision scientist and entrepreneur who co-founded Scalpel AI alongside Dr. Yeshwanth Pulijala to bring machine intelligence to surgical instrument tracking and healthcare supply chain management. He completed a Bachelor of Science in Mathematics (Honours) at the University of Calcutta, India, before pursuing postgraduate study in the UK. He earned his PhD in Computer Science from Queen Mary University of London, where he specialised in object detection and computer vision — the technical foundation that underlies every element of Scalpel AI's instrument recognition platform. He also has prior academic and research experience at Alfaisal University and the Indian Statistical Institute, Kolkata.
Ahmed serves as Co-Founder and CTO of Scalpel AI, where he has led all aspects of the company's technical architecture and AI platform development. The core challenge he has tackled is to make computer vision work reliably in the demanding, variable conditions of real-world surgical environments: operating theatres, sterile processing departments, and third-party logistics warehouses where lighting, instrument orientation, and handling conditions vary constantly. His proprietary algorithms and sensor fusion approaches have enabled the Scalpel platform to achieve instrument-level identification and tray validation without any physical tags, operating at a speed and accuracy that eliminates human error from the surgical supply chain.
Under Ahmed's technical leadership, Scalpel AI has demonstrated the ability to reduce surgical tray handling time by over 80 per cent and eliminate supply chain errors in large-scale deployments. The company's ScalpelGo mobile app — which extends AI validation to field representatives and logistics teams — and its integrations with ERP and instrument tracking platforms reflect his commitment to building technology that fits into clinical workflows rather than disrupting them. Scalpel AI raised £3.8 million in late 2024, led by Mercia Ventures, and has since deployed its platform with GlobalMed Logistix across thousands of joint reconstruction trays in the United States, validating the technology at commercial scale.
