Is the above image the future of medicine? In it, Dr. Luo Qingquan uses a sophisticated control center to guide a set of robotic surgery tools to remove a tumor from a patient’s lung 3,000 miles away.
Dr. Luo was seated in the Shanghai Chest Hospital on China’s Pacific Coast, while the patient was anesthetized on a bed inside a hospital in Kashgar, Xinjiang Autonomous Region.
The Chinese-made 5G Medbot allowed Luo to transmit his precision and decades of experience instantaneously across three time zones, ushering in an era of telesurgery that may save thousands in rural areas where lack of expert medical staff may have been a death sentence in previous years.
According to Shanghai Daily, the Shanghai Chest Hospital is the nation’s first medical facility carrying out robot-assisted surgery, and it is also the facility carrying out the largest quantity of such surgeries in China.
The global shortage of specialist surgeons is a major impediment to medical advancements in low and middle-income countries. With just over 1.1 million surgeons, but only half as many anesthesiologists, there really are shortages in high-income countries as well, but one review from the Lancet calculated that for every 100,000 people in low and middle-income countries, there are just 0.7 specialist surgeons, compared to 5.5 in high-income countries.
A surgeon in China successfully removed a lung tumor from a patient while being 5000 km away. The doctor operated the machine remotely from his office in Shanghai, while the patient was in Kashgar, located on the opposite side of the country. The entire operation was completed in… pic.twitter.com/8VQrpnvtS0
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48% of the world’s population enjoys the service of just 20% of the global surgical workforce, the paper continues.
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It takes over a decade to become a trained surgeon, but a robot can be shipped and installed in just a few months, allowing surgeons in richer countries to perform certain surgeries in poorer countries, or surgeons in richer areas to perform operations in poorer areas in the same country. In either case it’s a truly revolutionary development.
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