Healthcare inequality is a global challenge, with remote areas such as highlands and oceans lacking high-speed networks and specialized surgeons, making complex surgeries inaccessible. Conventional 5G telesurgery has a limited coverage radius (5,000 km) and relies on ground-based infrastructure. While satellite communication achieves global coverage (one satellite covers 1/3 of Earth’s surface), its 36,000-km altitude induces transmission latency exceeding 600 ms, far surpassing the surgical safety threshold (200 ms). Hence, achieving submillimeter precision under high latency is a major limitation for satellite-enabled telesurgery.
To that end, Prof. Rong Liu’s team from PLA General Hospital , collaborating with Northwestern Polytechnical University and Shanghai MicroPort MedBot, established a Lhasa-Beijing cross-regional link via the Asia-Pacific 6D high-throughput satellite. They implemented three key innovations:
Two patients, a 68-year-old male with liver cancer and a 56-year-old male with hepatic hemangioma, underwent successful surgeries:
Prof. Liu emphasized : "This technology expands a single surgical robot’s service radius from 5G’s 5,000 km to satellites’ 150,000 km. In disaster medicine scenarios—this is critical for battlefield and earthquake rescue operations."
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Contact the author: RONG LIU, liurong301 @126.com
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Intelligent Surgery
Experimental study
People
Feasibility and safety evaluation of remote robotic surgery under high latency conditions based on satellite communication
The authors declare that they have no known competing financial interests or personal relationships that could have appeared to influence the work reported in this paper.