Professor Seok-Ho Kang of Korea University Anam Hospital remotely operated a surgical robot installed in Shanghai from a console at COEX in Seoul, performing surgery on an animal model approximately 870 km away in real time1. The demonstration, conducted on July 16 at the 78th Annual Scientific Meeting of the Korean Urological Association (KUA 2026), marks the first cross-border telesurgery demonstration in Korea using a commercial surgical robot platform.
The procedure used Toumai, a surgical robot manufactured by MicroPort MedBot. Robotic arms at the Shanghai site reproduced Kang's movements in real time over a communications network. The demonstration was preclinical, conducted on an animal model rather than a human patient.
The event is described as the first cross-border telesurgery demonstration in urology in which Korean medical professionals directly operated a surgical robot remotely across national borders. Kang also serves as president of the Korean Society of Endourology and Robotics and is credited with pioneering complex robotic bladder cancer surgery, including becoming the first in Asia to successfully perform robot-assisted radical cystectomy and totally intracorporeal urinary diversion.
Telesurgery enables experienced specialists to participate in procedures without traveling to the patient's location, a capability framed as a way to reduce healthcare disparities in areas with limited access to medical care.
Kang said the demonstration showed how telesurgery can be carried out in an actual surgical setting across the physical distance between South Korea and China. He added that thorough validation, including patient safety protocols and an institutional framework, will be needed before telesurgery can be applied in real-world medical settings.
ANALYSIS The use of MicroPort MedBot's Toumai platform, rather than a Western-manufactured system, positions the demonstration as a reference case for Chinese-made surgical robotics in cross-border clinical workflows. Whether latency, regulatory clearance, or network reliability constraints limit scaling from preclinical animal models to human patients remains an open technical and regulatory question that Kang himself flagged.