I am a laparoendoscopic single-site (LESS) surgical robot, a native product to China. With more than 600 intellectual property rights and applications, I am surely "Made in China" by means of innovative technologies. Compared with the flexible arms of my foreign robot brothers, I have snake-shaped arms with higher flexibility and a wider range of motion, and I only need to make an incision on single site of a patient's body to complete the surgery. Moreover, when a surgery is performed with my assistance, the patient bleeds less during the surgery and recovers faster after the surgery.

Being satisfied with my excellent performance after trial use, Wenzhou People's Hospital invited me to jointly perform the nation's first full single-site robotic lower-right-half hemicolectomy on June 2. This surgery is also a registered clinical trial in which I have participated.  

The surgical equipment consists of two parts, one is the main control console and the other is the surgical cart. Here I can’t wait to "show" the surgical arms I’m proud of, which can be placed into human body through an incision of only 2.5cm in diameter. The four arms are snake-shaped and can be equipped with different tools such as scalpels, forceps and needles. My snake-shaped arms only require 7-cm expandable distance, making them flexible enough to perform highly difficult and precise surgeries in tight spaces.

At 2:20 pm, the surgery began with the close collaboration of Director Hu Yiren and and his team of General Surgery Department.

I smoothly entered the abdominal cavity from the patient's umbilicus. Sitting in front of the doctor console, Director Hu could clearly see the images inside the patient body through my 3D endoscope. Director Hu held the operating rod with both hands and operated the 3 surgical instruments and the endoscope. Skilfully operated by Director Hu, the 4 snake-shaped arms move flexibly and accurately, assisting the surgeon in performing the operation.

When the colonic Toldt space was separated upon the patient, Director Hu needed to use my snake-shaped surgical arms to strip out the colons that were attached to the abdominal wall in order to perform the next-step resection. Under his operation, one snake-shaped arm gently pulled up the tissue with a pair of forceps, assisted by another pair of forceps, the scalpels separated the adherent fascia little by little, the entire surgical process was very "smooth" without touching the surrounding dense blood vessels!

After the intestines requiring resection were separated, Director Hu performed another ligation, resection and intestinal anastomosis inside the abdominal cavity with the help of my snake-shaped arms. It is important to know that these steps used to be performed outside the abdominal cavity. The whole operation was successfully completed with my assistance. “The patient's incision is only 3cm, and if everything goes well, he will be able to get out of bed and walk tomorrow,” Director Hu said. 

Dr Hu praised me as his right-hand man, but I knew very well that the surgeon's surgical experience and clinical judgement, as well as his mastery of the surgical robot, was the key to the success of the entire operation. 

In the future, I will continue to upgrade my existing technology to help doctors perform more minimally-invasive and more precise surgical operations. Meanwhile, I will continuously broaden the fields of clinical applications in the ongoing clinical exploration of doctors, and will contribute to benefiting patients in a variety of clinical areas, including urology, gynaecology, paediatrics, general surgery and thoracic surgery, and even cardiac surgery, etc.