Since 2001, robotic tools have revolutionized the practice of surgery. They have greatly reduced the stress and physical demands normally placed on surgeons and have made certain procedures possible.
One example is "keyhole surgery", or minimally invasive （微创） surgery, which normally requires surgeons to stand at awkward angles and make difficult movements with their hands to make a cut inside the patient. But in June 2022, surgeon James Ansell used 3D glasses and two joysticks （操纵杆） to control four robotic arms to perform a procedure to remove a cancerous tumor （肿瘤）. "My colleague said . that this feels like cheating, " Ansell said to The Guardian.
Another area of surgery that has had major technological breakthroughs in recent years is telesurgery. Telesurgery, or remote surgery, is the use of technology that allows a surgeon to perform a procedure on a patient not in the same physical location.
Normally, telesurgery relies on a wired connection due to concerns of harming the patient if a wireless connection were to drop during surgery, but China made several advancements in wireless telesurgery based on 5G technology.
China achieved the first 5G-based remote operation in March 2019 involving a brain surgery procedure between a surgeon in Sanya and a patient in Beijing, a distance totaling nearly 3, 000 kilometers, reported CGTN. More recently, a team of surgeons successfully completed remote micron-level eye surgery on rabbits located in a different city, reported China Daily. The rabbits were at the Sun Yat-sen University in Guangzhou, Guangdong province, whereas the surgical team who operated on them via a 5G robot were at the Hainan Eye Hospital in Haikou, Hainan province.
Looking to the future, people hope that remote surgery could become commonplace to help heal injured soldiers on the battlefield while keeping surgeons at a safe distance. Some even believe that robotic systems, combined with AI, could one day surpass human surgeons. In 2022, engineers at Johns Hopkins University in the US used their Smart Tissue Autonomous Robot （STAR） to suture （缝合） the ends of a severed intestine （断肠） in four pigs, showing that certain procedures can be done autonomously by robots.
But, given current technological limitations and the high costs of these robots which can cost millions of dollars, the complete robot takeover of surgery may still be a while off.
