Panamanian Doctor Pereira Operated on a Brain from 200 km Away 0 15

The company XCath successfully completed the Operation Robo Angel mission, during which a doctor removed a thrombus from the brain of a living patient remotely for the first time in history, while being 200 km away from him.

The Panamanian medical startup XCath has achieved a success that could change the fate of millions of people. As part of the Operation Robo Angel project, the first fully remote robotic thrombectomy for the treatment of acute ischemic stroke was performed in history.

The main tool was the robotic system Iris. Neurosurgeon Vitor Mendes Pereira controlled the robot from a clinic in the city of Santiago de Veraguas, while the patient was in the capital of the country, Panama City. Despite the distance of more than 200 kilometers, the connection was stable, allowing the doctor to precisely navigate the instruments through the blood vessels of the brain and extract the thrombus on the first attempt. Previously, similar operations on living people were only performed with the surgeon physically present in the operating room or in an adjacent room.

This achievement is critically important for disaster medicine. In the case of a stroke, time is measured in minutes: every second, the brain loses thousands of cells. The ability to quickly connect a leading surgeon to a patient in a remote region saves time in situations where delays can be fatal. After the surgical intervention, the condition of the patient, who arrived with severe symptoms, significantly improved, and doctors expect his full recovery.

The significance of the success was emphasized by Dr. Pereira himself: "Mechanical thrombectomy has been proven to reduce mortality and disability in patients with ischemic stroke, but unfortunately, access to the procedure is extremely difficult. The work that XCath has done with the Iris system is an important step towards expanding access to treatment for patients around the world."

The success of Panamanian doctors and engineers proves that remote neurosurgery is already becoming a reality. In the future, such systems will allow saving lives where it was previously impossible.