Li Ming (pseudonym), a 50-year-old Beijinger who suffered from severe testicular cancer and had been told that it had spread to too much of his body to do surgery, never imagined hat a robot surgeon would be his salvation.
The robot, da Vinci, not only saved Li from death 14 months ago, but also enabled him to live without medicines which cost about 80,000 yuan ($11,812) per month.
The da Vinci code
Medical robots are developing rapidly in China, with 59 installed in the country as of October 28, and they have performed 35,273 operations, Huang Jian, director of the urology department at Guangdong's Sun Yat-Sen Memorial Hospital, was quoted as saying by the Science and Technology Daily.
"Being able to see with better accuracy, to reach what used to be unreachable by human hands, and to operate with stability," Huang explained, are the major advantages of the U.S.-built da Vinci medical robots.
According to the manufacturer's website, the da Vinci system features a magnified 3D high-definition vision system and tiny-wristed instruments that bend and rotate to a degree far greater than the human hand.
As of January 2016, the medical robot industry has a global revenue of $7.47 billion and its compound growth rate is expected to remain at 15.4 percent annually over the next five years, according to BCG Boston Consulting data.
Useful but pricy
"Da Vinci has become one of doctors' most useful tools, helping us perform formerly impossible operations," Zhu Gang, chief surgeon of the Beijing-based United Family Healthcare Hospital, told the Global Times.
Zhu said he has performed a total of 20 operations with the robotic system.
Da Vinci brings about real benefits for patients, he said, adding that there is no universal payment standard for these operations in China, and the price varies in Beijing, Shanghai and other places.
It costs about 30,000 yuan more than laparoscopic, or "keyhole" surgery on average, he explained.
"Patients who understand the perks of the da Vinci surgical system and can afford it prefer it to the traditional ones, and from the stance of surgeons, we think da Vinci can cause relatively fewer injuries, be more precise and lead to faster recoveries," Zhu noted.
Da Vinci can be regarded as an updated extension of laparoscopic surgeries, so there is no special way to define and delimit its role separately, Zhu said.
Surgeons welcome medical robots as they have so many advantages, for example they can conduct remote operations, with no scrubbing-in needed, Su Qi, head of the Anorectal Surgery Department in the Shenyang-based Shengjing Hospital of China Medical University, told the Global Times on Monday.
Importantly, surgeons can be seated while operating the robots, which not only help save their strength from doing hours-long complicated surgeries, but also enables them to make clearer decisions in the process before they are worn out, said Su.
A traditional laparoscope can zoom in 3 to 5 times, while da Vinci can zoom in 10 to 15 times, at every angle required, Su said.
Also, the tiny-wristed instruments can reach and work in extremely narrow spaces. For instance, they are perfect for operations on rectums or on prostates, where hands are too big and too clumsy to operate, Su explained.
"A highly experienced surgeon will take less than two weeks to finish the basic training to operate the robots," he noted.
However, both Doctor Su and Doctor Zhu pointed out that there are no statistics which prove da Vinci can effectively lower the chance of medical complications.
It costs about 20 million yuan to provide one such device to a hospital in China, about three times more than it does for U.S. hospitals and maintenance costs another 1 million yuan every year, let alone pricy replacement parts, Su said.
U.S. manufacturers have a monopoly in this field, and China should research and invent its own medical robotics, maybe starting with simple ones, which is the only way the country can really set prices and make it more popular, Su urged.
