'Made in China' Breakthrough: Shanghai Children's Medical Center Performs the Nation's First Single-Port Robotic Mediastinal Tumor Surgery in a Child

The Department of Cardiothoracic Surgery at Shanghai Children's Medical Center has successfully used a domestically made single-port robot to remove a giant mediastinal tumor in a 12-year-old patient — the first pediatric thoracic surgery in China performed with a single-port snake-arm robot. The child had a 7 x 6 x 5 centimeter tumor in the left anterior superior mediastinum, lying close to the pericardium, the thymus and major mediastinal vessels, making the procedure extremely risky. The team led by Sun Yanjun, chief physician, used a Chinese-made robot equipped with bendable snake-like surgical instruments and a three-dimensional high-definition view magnified more than tenfold.

Working through a single incision of about 3 centimeters, the team separated the adhesions and removed the tumor completely. Blood loss for the entire operation was only about 10 milliliters, no intraoperative complications occurred, and the child's postoperative vital signs were stable. To date the hospital has completed nearly 260 procedures with the domestic single-port robot across more than a dozen procedure types, and the technology has been adopted by children's hospitals in Beijing, Guangzhou, Fuzhou, Xiamen and elsewhere.