Hong Kong to pilot robotic telesurgery with Switzerland

The Chinese University of Hong Kong and the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich recently performed what may have been the world’s first remote tele-endoscopy.

In a groundbreaking study, they performed a biopsy on the stomach lining of a living pig model in an operating room in Hong Kong, from a control room in Zurich, Switzerland, more than 9,300 kilometers (5,700 miles) away.

It involved the use of a portable surgical system with a magnetic endoscope and a robotic platform. The live telesurgery was facilitated via the computer communication protocol, WebSocket.

The surgical system was installed in the hybrid operating room of the Hong Kong government-funded Multi-Scale Medical Robotics Center at CUHK, a facility dedicated to evaluating new surgical robots and medical devices. ETH Zurich is one of the center’s collaborators.

An important finding of this study was that the endoscope could achieve full retroflexion (or a complete U-turn), demonstrating that “magnetic endoscopes can move as freely as standard devices”.

WHY IT IS IMPORTANT

Dr. Shannon Melissa Chan, Assistant Professor at the Department of Surgery, Faculty of Medicine, CUHK, highlighted the potential of remote tele-endoscopy to provide intensive care in remote areas.

“An outside expert can even instruct trained nurses to perform the procedures. Millions of patients worldwide could be diagnosed and treated in time for gastrointestinal cancer as endoscopic technology becomes more accessible,” she was quoted as saying in a press release.

Dr. Bradley Nelson, professor and head of the Institute for Robotics and Intelligent Systems at ETH Zurich, also pointed to the potential applications of telesurgery in areas such as the gastrointestinal tract and the neurovascular system, as well as in fetal surgery.

The research team from CUHK-ETH Zurich will now apply teleendoscopy to a human stomach. However, they have not yet said whether this will be done in vivo or not.

THE BIGGER TREND

Remote telesurgery has developed enormously since the first recorded operation was performed in 2021 between France and the United States.

Last year, a Research between Japan and Singapore has shown that the operation can be carried out over a distance of 5,000 kilometers using a dedicated international high-speed fiber optic network.