A London surgeon recently completed an operation that sounds like the plot of a science fiction movie: He remotely controlled a surgical robot in a hospital in Gibraltar, about 1,500 miles away in London, England, to remove a cancerous prostate for a male patient, making the London clinic the first hospital in the UK to successfully complete telesurgery.
The landmark surgery was performed on 62-year-old Paul Buxton by Professor Prokar Dasgupta, a urology specialist at the London Clinic Robotics Center in Harley Street, London. The surgery took place at St Bernard's Hospital in the British Overseas Territory of Gibraltar in southern Spain. The doctor and the patient, one in London and the other in Gibraltar, completed the entire prostate removal process through real-time Internet connection.
A Toumai robotic surgical system was used during the surgery. Professor Dasgupta remotely controls the system's four robotic arms and a 3D high-definition camera from a console in the UK, while a robot in the operating theater in Gibraltar performs the delicate operations inside the patient. According to reports, the delay between the doctor's actions and the robot's response is only about 60 milliseconds. This delay is enough to make the entire operation close to "real-time" in the subjective perception of the operator. This is crucial for oncology surgery that requires highly precise operations, and is much higher than the real-time requirements required by ordinary people to remotely pilot drones or cloud games.
In order to cope with possible network interruptions, Gibraltar also has a local surgical team on standby to take over the operation if there is a connection problem. However, it was reported that the prostatectomy procedure went smoothly and there were no interruptions or other unexpected incidents.
For Buxton, who has lived in Gibraltar for 40 years, the appeal of this form of remote surgery is obvious. He does not have to fly to London or Madrid to undergo complex surgery, nor does he have to leave home for weeks. Treatment can be completed at a local hospital. According to reports, Buxton said he felt "great" just days after the surgery.
The operation is said to be the first of its kind in the UK, but it is not the first time that remote robotic surgery has been carried out across borders. The earliest and most famous case dates back to the "Lindbergh Operation" in 2001, when surgeons in New York performed a cholecystectomy remotely on a patient in Strasbourg, France.
In recent years, remote robotic prostate surgery has also been launched in other countries. These include a transcontinental operation in 2024 that will connect Rome, Italy and Beijing, China via the Internet; and several remote prostate surgeries completed in different locations in Africa using the same Toumai platform. This broader practical context shows that this is not a mere “gimmick demonstration” but a signal that remote robotic surgery is moving closer to actual clinical applications.
If the relevant technology can be proven to be stable and reliable enough, in the future expert surgeons are expected to sit on the spot in large central hospitals and perform difficult surgeries for patients in remote areas or areas with limited medical resources, reducing the time and cost for them to travel long distances or wait in line for limited local experts.
However, there are still many unresolved problems in reality. Completing the operation via fiber optic links and 5G backup networks naturally raises concerns about infrastructure reliability, redundancy and fail-safe mechanisms, regulatory regulations and cost investment. It is foreseeable that hospitals are unlikely to regard this kind of cross-regional remote robotic surgery as a daily service like routine physical examination in the short term, but are more likely to be limited to strictly screened specific cases and research projects.