09/07/2026
The progress in china https://www.facebook.com/share/p/1DAwAtM5ei/
A surgeon in Shanghai just removed a tumor from a patient's lung 5,000 kilometers away — without ever leaving his city.
On July 13, 2024, Dr. Luo Qingquan sat down at a robotic surgical console inside Shanghai Chest Hospital. The patient lay under anesthesia at the Second People's Hospital of Kashgar, in China's far-western Xinjiang region — a straight-line distance of roughly 5,000km, spanning multiple time zones. A domestically-built 5G surgical robot stood over her, mirroring Luo's every hand movement in real time.
The patient, a middle-aged local woman, had a growing mass in her right upper lung first detected three years earlier. After reviewing her case remotely, Luo's team determined she was a strong candidate for the procedure.
This wasn't attempted on a whim. The two hospitals spent over a year preparing: animal-model testing in March and June 2023 to prove the technology's safety, a formal ethics review, and a joint pre-operative case conference between surgical teams on both ends before the patient was even enrolled.
On the day of surgery, Luo operated the console using a high-definition 3D view, controlling the robotic arms' distance and camera focus with foot pedals while the signal transmitted instantly across thousands of kilometers. On the Kashgar side, Dr. Chen Tianxiang and Dr. Huang Jia led the in-person team, coordinating directly with Luo throughout. Dissecting, separating, cutting, and suturing — every command executed smoothly on the far end.
The entire operation was completed in about an hour. Luo later said it felt exactly as if he were standing in the Kashgar operating room himself — the connection was that seamless.
It's being called the world's first ultra-long-distance robotic lung tumor removal using entirely Chinese-developed surgical robot technology (built by Shanghai MicroPort MedBot). The bigger implication: patients in remote or underserved regions may no longer need to travel to major cities to access top-tier surgical expertise — the expertise can now travel to them, instantly, over a network connection.
