A surgeon no longer needs to be in the operating room next to the patient to perform surgery; they can do it from a great distance by controlling a robotic arm – remotely. Although telemedicine has been developing in the West for several decades, it was first used in China last year when a surgeon from a hospital in Shanghai performed a remote knee replacement surgery. With synchronized image and sound via 5G technology, he managed to replace the knee joint of a patient in the city of Kunming. In February of this year, a thirty-year-old woman had her gallbladder removed at Sir Run Run Shaw University Hospital in Zhejiang, and during the operation, the surgeon remotely controlled the robotic arm from four and a half thousand kilometers away in Hangzhou. The state magazine Science and Technology Daily reported that during the thirty-minute operation on the patient, the surgeon controlled a four-armed laparoscopic robot. The chief physician of Sir Run Run Shaw Hospital in Hangzhou Liang Xiao stated that the success demonstrates that remote surgery supported by robots can be widely performed.
Remote surgery can not only improve the quality of local medical services but can also be a valuable aid in teaching doctors in remote areas through live demonstrations of surgeries. Why is it interesting what is happening in the field of telemedicine and remote surgeries in China? Because the mentioned operation is part of large Chinese national plans to enhance the use of 5G-based robotics in medical care.
5G in Medicine
The Chinese National Health Commission and the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology have published guidelines for the development and application of robotics in ten sectors, encouraging hospitals to use robots for performing minimally invasive surgery, building operating rooms for robotic applications, and developing standards and specifications for the clinical use of robots. China also intends to develop medical robots for intensive care, emergency assistance, and rehabilitation, and this process is being accelerated by the introduction of 5G networks across the country. This technology offers a very reliable network but low latency, which is extremely important in telemedicine.
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Advanced telecommunications, 5G networks, and robotics are the future of medical care for patients in the most remote parts of this vast Far Eastern country, according to some research that is technologically more powerful than the USA.
The Universe Underwater
However, what recently happened in China for the first time occurred in America twenty-two years ago when surgeons from New York performed the first remote surgery on a patient in France in 2001. However, in the early stages of development, telemedicine was not envisioned for widespread use but as a method for treating astronauts in space. The robot doctor project emerged alongside humanity’s conquest of space because, as soon as scientists began to think about space flight, the question arose of who would treat astronauts there in case of need. In the early 1970s, NASA developed the idea of robotic doctors, working with the U.S. military to create reliable robots that could perform surgery remotely. Soon, this idea was accepted in some other developed countries, and in 2006, Canadian surgeon Mehran Anvari used a robot to stitch a wound on a worker at the underwater base Aquarius, demonstrating what space tele-surgery could be like. The same surgeon began operating with this method less than ten years ago and performed a series of surgeries, from the colon, hernia, to others, controlling a surgical robot from St. Joseph’s Hospital in Hamilton, Canada, located 400 kilometers away.
Acceleration of Robotics
Today’s robots, supported by artificial intelligence, are much more efficient than those used in medical trials decades ago. Besides medicine, they are used in all industries, which is why every year more robots help people perform tasks or completely take them away. For example, China intends to accelerate the use of robotics and other advanced technologies not only in medical care but also in manufacturing, agriculture, and construction, planning to become a world leader and innovation hub in areas from robotics and artificial intelligence to 5G telecommunications, with its robotics industry growing about 15 percent annually.
According to the International Federation of Robotics (IFR), China has topped the charts for industrial robot density in recent years, installing 154,000. America, Japan, and South Korea have significantly lagged behind: America installed only 55,200 robots, Japan 40,400, and South Korea 37,800. However, these four countries are not the only ones using robots. According to a study by Oxford Economics, the number of robots worldwide has tripled in the last two decades to 2.25 million. Additionally, the stock of operational robots has reached a record of about three and a half million units, with the value of installations estimated at 15.7 billion dollars.
