A Surgeon in Seoul Controls Surgery in Shanghai
A surgeon sat at a console in Seoul while the robot he controlled stood about 870 kilometers away in Shanghai.
The patient was a pig, and the goal was to test whether an operation could cross a national border in real time.
Telesurgery means operating a robot over a communication network while the surgeon and the patient are in different places.
It matters because it could let a specialist reach patients who cannot reach a specialist.
What happened in Seoul
On October 19, 2026, Korea University Anam Hospital announced the demonstration.
Professor Kang Seok-ho of the Department of Urology controlled a console at the Korean Urological Association’s 78th Annual Meeting at COEX in Seoul.
The robotic arms in Shanghai mirrored his movements in real time.
According to the hospital, the system was the Toumai robot developed by MicroPort MedBot of China.
Kang said the delay between his hands and the robot was about 30 to 40 milliseconds.
He also said the procedure ran over ordinary telecommunications networks and not a specially installed connection.
The hospital called it South Korea’s first cross-border telesurgery with a surgical robot platform.
What the demonstration does not show
The patient was an experimental animal, so the demonstration was preclinical.
The delay figure comes from Kang’s own account, and no independent study supports the result yet.
Source check: this is a hospital-reported milestone on an animal, and no independent study supports it yet.
Kang said patient safety and institutional foundations must be verified before any clinical use.
He said Korean law permits certain remote support between medical professionals but does not expressly authorize direct cross-border robotic surgery on patients.
He also named liability and patient data security as open questions, including who is responsible if something goes wrong.
What it could change in the OR
A future case would put a specialist at a console in one city and a trained team at the table in another.
Kang said about 1,500 telesurgical procedures have been performed on human patients worldwide, most of them in China.
That count is his estimate, and it suggests telesurgery already has clinical use in some places even though this demonstration did not.
His next step is more animal experiments, including a possible cross-border procedure with a single-port robot.
Until the legal and safety questions are answered, a pig in Shanghai remains a proof of concept.
The 2026 Surgical Technology Intelligence Report goes deeper on surgical technology claims.
