Chinese team performs world-first robotic surgery from Rome in Beijing

A Chinese surgeon performed a remote transcontinental tele-surgery from Rome on a prostate cancer patient in Beijing, over 8,000 kilometers away. Professor Zhang Xu performed the live surgery at a conference in Italy, guiding robotic arms remotely via a surgical console to complete the delicate work of removing a lesion from the patient's prostate.

A Chinese team of medics, including a back-up surgeon, watched the operation closely at the Third Medical Center of the People's Liberation Army General Hospital. The delay was only 135 milliseconds standard suggested by various medical studies for tele-surgery.