SS Innovations, an Indian maker of surgical robots listed on Nasdaq, says its SSi Mantra system has now been used in 205 telesurgeries, operations where the surgeon controls the robot from somewhere else. The company gave the figure, counted to 23 October, in a release on 26 October.
At the EACTS heart and chest surgery meeting in Barcelona, the company’s chief executive, Dr Sudhir Srivastava, repaired a hole between the upper chambers of the heart (an atrial septal defect) in a patient at a hospital in Bengaluru, India, about 12,000 km away. The operation was shown live on stage, with a surgeon supporting at the patient’s side. At a surgical robotics conference in New Delhi, four surgeons carried out four more remote operations, including kidney and bowel procedures and one on a child.
These are the company’s own figures, and the conference cases were showcases rather than a study with published results. The robot is not yet cleared in the United States: SS Innovations says it answered the FDA’s questions on its application, for gallbladder removal, on 5 October and expects a decision in the first quarter of 2027.
Earlier this week AIooze covered a US study in which a surgeon removed a prostate from 35 miles away.