Health
Chinese Surgeon Performs Groundbreaking 5,000-Mile Remote Robotic Surgery From Rome
In incredible video, a doctor conducted the “world’s first” remote surgery from 5,000 miles away.
Imagine undergoing surgery from a physician on a different continent.
Well, you might not have to keep imagining.
Technologies like robotics and artificial intelligence may replace jobs like banking and customer service as they become more prevalent in the workforce.
However, their medical powers are proving particularly revolutionary.
In a first for the world, a Chinese surgeon travelled all the way from Rome to Beijing to perform a robot-assisted prostate removal on a patient.
The surgeon was able to perform the procedure remotely by connecting to a set of robotic arms using a long-distance operation called telesurgery.
The operation was performed in July 2024, but after going viral on Reddit, it has lately started to blow people away once more.
“Telesurgery is one of the most important development directions in the future of surgery,” said Zhang Xu, director of urology at the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) General Hospital, who performed the surgery.
Without being physically present, the surgeon was able to gently remove a lesion on the patient’s prostate thanks to China’s fiber-optic connections and fast 5G network.
The surgery uses a console that displays the patient’s image in real time. By accurately and precisely simulating the surgeon’s actions, the robotic arms in the operation enable treatments such as radical prostatectomy—the removal of malignant prostate tissue—to be carried out thousands of kilometres away. A medical team and a backup surgeon in Beijing physically accompanied the patient to ensure no unanticipated events occurred.
Given the 20,000 km distance, Zhang stated that his primary concern was any possible latencies in movements.
“The biggest problem with remote surgery is communication and whether there is a delay,” Zhang said, according to a report from state broadcaster CCTV’s military channel. “Today’s surgery basically has no delay and is almost the same as on-site surgery.”
Thankfully, latency was limited to 135 milliseconds, which is significantly less than the 200 millisecond threshold that is recommended by research for these kinds of procedures.
“For me it was really a historical experience, a historical moment,” said Vito Pansadoro, one of conference’s directors and a specialist in robotic surgery, according to CCTV.
The procedure was streamed live during the Rome-based Challenges in Laparoscopy and Robotics & AI conference.
Medical experts are increasingly using robotic-assisted surgery (RAS), and Zhang and his time are leading the way in this regard.
“We are able to overcome the geographical inaccessibility, putting the best surgical resources from metropolitan cities like Beijing and Shanghai into the most remote areas in real-time,” explains Zhang, as per Nature.
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