By Dou Hao, People’s Daily
Decades ago, the notion of performing major surgery across continents seemed nearly impossible. Yet on July 19 in Strasbourg, France, during the Society of Robotic Surgery 2025 Annual Meeting, a Chinese-developed surgical robot turned this vision into reality.
Professor Liang Xiao of Sir Run Run Shaw Hospital affiliated with Zhejiang University School of Medicine, who was attending an academic conference abroad, sat in front of a control console, his hands precisely moving the control rods.
More than 10,000 kilometers away in Hangzhou, east China’s Zhejiang province, an 80-year-old patient laid on an operating table. Under the close supervision of an on-site surgical team, the robotic arms mirrored Professor Liang’s every movement, performing a delicate liver resection with exceptional accuracy.
The patient, surnamed Wu, had been hospitalized for a scheduled procedure. However, his conditions deteriorated when Professor Liang was joining the academic conference abroad, immediate surgery became necessary. To ensure timely treatment and with full trust in his attending physician, the patient agreed to undergo the operation using the hospital’s most advanced cross-border remote robotic surgery technology.
Supported by the Chinese domestically developed surgical robot, the entire procedure was completed in just 50 minutes. Professor Liang successfully performed a robot-assisted remote left hepatic lobectomy for liver cancer. The patient is currently in stable condition and recovering well.
“Given Wu’s complicated liver condition, the surgery was particularly challenging,” Liang explained. Before the operation, the surgical team conducted a thorough assessment of his liver reserve function, meticulously mapped the resection area, and obtained informed consent for the remote procedure. They closely monitored the surgery in real time and stood ready to respond to any contingencies, ensuring absolute safety.
Liver resection is inherently technically challenging. Performing it remotely over a distance of more than 10,000 kilometers required exceptional stability of the robot, flawless network transmission, and outstanding surgical skill and judgment from the lead surgeon.
Throughout the surgery, the robot operated steadily, with clear real-time image transmission and uninterrupted voice interaction. Through seamless collaboration between Chinese and French experts, all surgical objectives were successfully accomplished.
Sir Run Run Shaw Hospital leads in developing domestic surgical robots and routinely conducts cross-campus remote procedures. By leveraging artificial intelligence (AI), the hospital has established innovative remote healthcare partnerships with medical institutions in Aral, Xinjiang, and Jiangshan, Zhejiang. These include remote robotic surgeries, joint consultations, and AI-assisted ultrasound examinations, effectively connecting leading hospitals with grassroots medical institutions, and mitigating regional disparities in medical resources, particularly in border, mountainous, and island areas.
Professor Liang’s team previously achieved a milestone in 2023, performing China’s first 5,000-km remote cholecystectomy using domestic robotics on a patient in Aral. Just days before his departure to France, he conducted another pioneering remote liver cancer surgery for a patient in the mountainous region of Jiangshan.
“Remote robotic surgery imposes extremely high requirements on the speed and stability of long-distance data transmission. With its high speed, large bandwidth, and low latency, 5G technology has brought a transformative breakthrough to remote healthcare, especially robotic surgery,” Liang said.
The ongoing innovation in remote surgery, he added, is advancing surgical robots from “operational tools” to comprehensive “medical platforms,” extending the benefits of advanced minimally invasive medicine to more patients in more places.
