The Indian cardiologist who repairs woman's heart from 32km away

When prominent cardiologist Dr Tejas Patel performed an angioplasty on a patient, he didn’t use his own hands. Perhaps, the surgeon was not even in the operating theatre of his Apex Hospital. Sitting behind a console at the complex of the Akshardham temple in Gandhinagar, Dr Tejas on Wednesday successfully performed an angioplasty on a middle-aged woman who was 32 kilometres away from him using the world's first telerobotic coronary intervention.

According to a report, the woman had suffered a heart attack a few days back and underwent an angioplasty at the hospital to remove the blockage in an artery. On Wednesday, Dr Patel, a blockage in another blood vessel was removed using the robotic procedure. The procedure, which reportedly lasted about just 15 minutes and driven by cutting-edge technology, was done using an internet-enabled robotic arm at the cath lab in the operation theatre, which Dr Patel guided the robot to perform the surgery remotely, even as a team of doctors and paramedics attended the patient in the OT to take care of any eventualities.

According to Dr Patel, telerobotics is a mix of telemedicine and robotics and can bring drastic changes in the way advance healthcare is administered to patients in remote regions.

“Today, the patient was 32km away, tomorrow, using the same technology, it will be possible for expert hands to hands to operate on patients anywhere in the state, country and world. This has the power to transform coronary interventions in practice and beyond,” Dr Patel was quoted as saying by the newspaper after the surgery. Dr Patel added that surgeons can cater to patients from anywhere as long as they are at a facility with a cath lab, a robotic arm and a reliable internet connection.

The first telerobotic surgery was performed in 2001, when a laparoscopic gallbladder procedure was performed from across the Atlantic, said the company CEO that provided the technology for the surgery, adding that this was the first-ever minimal invasive catheter-based heart procedure in the world.

It is said that after more than two years of preparation, Dr Patel went ahead with the procedure to experiment with the full-fledged live surgery. Reportedly, the senior cardiologist has so far performed about 300 robotic surgeries.

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