A surgeon at AdventHealth Celebration in Florida removed a patient’s prostate on 25 October while the patient lay in an operating room at AdventHealth Minneola, about 35 miles away. Dr Vipul Patel controlled the surgical robot remotely over a network link. The operation was part of a clinical study run under a US Food and Drug Administration Investigational Device Exemption (IDE), which allows an unapproved device to be tested on patients under set conditions.
The robot is MicroPort MedBot’s Toumai surgical system, which is still investigational. AdventHealth says the exemption “does not constitute FDA approval or clearance” of the system for this use. A second surgeon, Dr Marcio Moschovas, stayed at the bedside with a surgical team, ready to step in.
AdventHealth says published evidence so far has not documented a robotic telesurgery between two US locations. The case follows 10 earlier investigational telesurgeries between Orlando and Luanda, Angola.
Why it matters: remote surgery could one day bring specialist surgeons to patients far from large hospitals. But this is one case in an ongoing study. Researchers are still checking outcomes, safety, network performance, cybersecurity and what happens if the connection fails, and no results have been published.
Source: AdventHealth