The Chinese University of Hong Kong and the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich recently conducted the world’s first remote endoscopy.
In a pioneering study, they performed biopsies of the stomach wall of a live pig model in an operating room in Hong Kong from a control room in Zurich, Switzerland, more than 9,300 km (5,700 miles) away.
It involves the use of a mobile surgical system with a magnetic endoscope and a robotic platform. Direct remote surgery is performed via a computer communication protocol, WebSocket.
The surgical system was installed in a hybrid operating room at the Hong Kong government-funded Multi-Scale Medical Robotics Centre at CUHK, a facility that evaluates new surgical robots and medical devices. ETH Zurich is one of the centre’s collaborators.
An important finding of this study was that the endoscope achieved complete reverse curvature (or complete U-turn), demonstrating that “the magnetic endoscope can move as freely as standard equipment[s]”
WHY IT MATTERS
Dr Shannon Melissa Chan, associate professor in the Department of Surgery at CUHK Faculty of Medicine, highlighted the potential of performing teleendoscopy to provide critical care in remote areas.
“A remote expert can even guide trained nurses through the procedure. Millions of patients worldwide will be able to receive timely diagnosis and treatment for gastrointestinal cancers as endoscopy technology becomes more accessible,” she was quoted as saying in a press release.
Dr. Bradley Nelson, professor and head of ETH Zurich’s Institute for Robotics and Intelligent Systems, also noted the potential applications of remote surgery in areas such as the gastrointestinal tract and the neurovascular system, as well as in fetal surgery.
The CUHK-ETH Zurich team will now move on to applying the remote endoscopy method to human stomachs, although they have not said whether this will be done in a living body.
THE BIGGER TREND
Remote surgery has come a long way since the first recorded surgery in 2021 between France and the United States.
Last year, one Research between Japan and Singapore has demonstrated that this operation can be performed over a distance of 3,107 miles using a dedicated international high-speed fiber optic network.
