A London surgeon has recently made medical history as he successfully conducted the UK’s very first long-distance robotic operation on a patient that was located nearly 1500 miles away from him. The surgeon in question is Professor Prokar Dasgupta, a world-leading robotic urological surgeon who heads up The London Clinic’s Robotic Centre of Excellence. On March 4, Dasgupta performed a remote prostatectomy on a 62 year old man in Gibraltar, using the Toumai Robotic System by Microport.
The UK’s first long-distance robotic surgery
The remote robotic surgery was carried out at The London Clinic in collaboration with the Gibraltar Health Authority. The patient, Paul Buxton, required the surgery following a prostate cancer diagnosis in January. He was offered the opportunity to take part in this telesurgery trial and, according to the BBC, he ‘jumped at the chance’ to become the first patient in the UK and Gibraltar to undergo successful telesurgery.
Professor Dasgupta performed the surgery at The London Clinic on Harley Street using a robot equipped with four arms and a 3D HD camera. The robot was controlled through a console in the UK (operated by Dasgupta) that was connected using fibre-optic cables and a back up 5g link. With a delay of just 0.06 seconds, Dasgupta was able to control the robot to operate on Buxton, who was located at his local hospital in Gibraltar (around 2,400km away from the clinic in London).
A team at the hospital in Gibraltar were on standby in case of a connection failure, but all went to plan. Buxton’s surgery was the first of two test operations that took place this month. These test cases offered a glimpse into how remote robotic surgery could change the future of healthcare, sparing future patients the inconvenience of having to travel to undergo medical treatments and allowing surgeons to operate on those living in remote locations.
The NHS is reportedly prioritising local robotic-assisted surgery and is supposedly hoping to deliver 500,000 robot-supported operations a year by 2035.
You can read more about the UK’s first remote robotic telesurgery here.
