Is the image above the future of medicine? It shows Dr. Luo Qingquan using a sophisticated control center to manipulate a set of robotic surgical instruments to remove a tumor from a patient's lung 5,000km away.
Dr. Luo was at the Shanghai Thoracic Hospital on China's Pacific coast, while the patient was under anesthesia on a bed at a hospital in Kashgar, Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region, on the opposite side of China. The entire operation was completed within one hour.
The Chinese-developed 5G Medbot allowed Luo to instantly transmit his precision and decades of experience across three time zones. The operation was a success, ushering in an era of telesurgery that could save thousands of lives in rural areas where a shortage of experienced medical personnel could have been a death sentence in previous years.
According to Shanghai Daily, Shanghai Chest Hospital is the first medical institution in the country to perform robotic surgery, and also the institution that performs the largest number of such surgeries in China.
In 2009, Dr. Luo Qingquan performed the world's first single-lumen robotic surgery to remove early-stage lung cancer. It was performed using the da Vinci three-stage surgical system. The news of the first such surgery in history was published in the journal Translational Lung Cancer Research, in which Luo shared his experience, methods, and processes.
In preparation for the first remote surgery, Lo's team performed remote robotic surgery on an animal in March to confirm its safety and feasibility.
Currently, robotic surgery leaves three to four small incisions on the patient's body. To make the procedure less invasive, Lo is exploring the use of a multi-armed robot to assist in single-hole surgeries. With this new technique, only one 4-centimeter-diameter hole is required during surgery, and patients are able to walk freely the next day, speeding up their recovery and discharge from the hospital.
The global shortage of specialist surgeons is a major obstacle to medical advances in low- and middle-income countries. With just over 1.1 million surgeons but only half the number of anaesthetists, high-income countries are also facing shortages. One Lancet review calculated that there are just 0.7 specialist surgeons for every 100,000 people in low- and middle-income countries, compared with 5.5 in high-income countries.
The article also found that 48% of the world’s population uses just 20% of the world’s surgical workforce.
It takes more than a decade to become a trained surgeon, but a robot can be delivered and installed in just a few months, allowing surgeons from richer countries to perform certain operations in poorer countries, or surgeons from richer areas to perform operations in poorer areas of the same country. Either way, it's a truly revolutionary development.
ORIENT news
