A surgeon in Zurich has performed the world’s first remote endoscopy procedure on a pig in Hong Kong, as researchers believe it paves the path for better and immediate surgical care in remote areas where local expertise is lacking.

The procedure was conducted in May as part of a joint-study between the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Zurich and the Chinese University of Hong Kong (CUHK) which started two years ago.

The clinician in Switzerland controlled a surgical controller that was remotely connected across 9,300 kilometres to an endoscope in the operating theatre in Hong Kong, CUHK said, noting that the endoscope matched every movement the clinician made.

“The design was to use multiple small magnets to build our endoscope and use a magnetic field to control the direction, forward, backward, turn left, turn right, to control the angulation of the endoscope to perform an endoscopy," says Dr Shannon Chan from CUHK.

“So the surgeon in Switzerland would use the controller to control the magnetic field in Hong Kong and thus, with that, he could control the endoscope.”

Dr Chan said the technology could be a game-changer for remote areas where local expertise is lacking.

“For places where they are lacking in experts, for example, in gastrointestinal disease, then the experts in their hometown can control and perform the endoscope for patients… so the experts can diagnose and treat patients from afar,” she said.

“We are hoping that with this technology... we are able to train doctors in resource-limited areas to perform some procedures remotely instead of having to fly over to their country to teach them.”

But Dr Chan noted a key prerequisite would be a stable Wi-Fi network in those areas, saying that would take a few years.

She added that it's too early to compare the success rate of remote surgery with conventional procedure, saying the research team's next step is to prove the procedure is safe on human patients.