Kyushu University starts two-year trial of robotic microsurgery 110 km away over NTT's all-photonics network

Kyushu University has started a two-year trial, running through 2027 with support from Japan's internal affairs ministry, in which surgeons at Kyushu University Hospital in Fukuoka will remotely operate a microsurgery robot at its Beppu hospital about 110 km away over NTT's IOWN APN all-photonics network, according to ITmedia as reported by Robot Newspaper (irobotnews); the university's own release was not opened, so details are unconfirmed.

According to the report, partners include the Japan Surgical Society, F.MED, which is developing a robot to suture vessels under 1 mm with thread finer than 0.009 mm, NTT DOCOMO BUSINESS, NTT Innovative Devices and Seiran, and the trial targets round-trip latency under 5 milliseconds with uncompressed high-definition video.

This year's work tests video transmission quality; in 2027 the team plans to operate the robot remotely, and it will also trial a patented video-annotation tool for supervising surgeons. Remote surgery is a theme MEKAWIRE follows through surgical-robot companies such as CMR Surgical, whose Stryker deal this week shows the commercial side, and NTT is already in our company database.