Medical and Multi-Scale Robotics: The Multi-Scale Medical Robotics Center, Endoscopic Surgery and Intercontinental Telesurgery

Completing a surgery across more than 10,000 kilometres means top-tier medical capability could, in principle, break through geographic limits — a patient in a remote region could theoretically be treated by a specialist on another continent, working through a robot. Medical robotics is one of CUHK's most visible engineering–medicine intersections over the past decade or so. This article traces the threads — the InnoHK-supported Multi-Scale Medical Robotics Center (MRC), endoscopic/surgical robots, micro/nanorobots and intercontinental telesurgery — with figures and dates cited in place. The research scale runs from centimetre-scale surgical robots down to micron/nanometre-scale micro/nanorobots.

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# 1. Overview: a collaborative platform spanning engineering and medicine

Asked in one sentence what CUHK has done in robotics, the answer is this: it has strung centimetre-scale surgical arms, millimetre-scale magnetically controlled endoscopes and micron-scale intravascular robot swarms into one continuum of scales, with the abiding goal of clinical translation. CUHK's robotics research straddles the Faculty of Medicine (surgery, endoscopy) and the Faculty of Engineering (Department of Mechanical and Automation Engineering), with the InnoHK-backed Multi-Scale Medical Robotics Center (MRC) as the collaborative platform. It brings together two of CUHK's strongest disciplines — engineering (robotics, information engineering) and medicine (clinical practice) — in continuation of the University's tradition of uniting teaching, research and clinical care, albeit this time with a robot beside the operating table.

This research line did not grow out of nowhere. It rests on two institutional foundations. The first is the Hong Kong SAR Government's HK$10 billion InnoHK flagship innovation and technology scheme — under which CUHK leads or participates in six research centres spanning health, biomedicine, robotics and artificial intelligence (per a CUHK feature^※). The second is the Faculty of Engineering's accumulation in robotics, anchored since 2016 in the T Stone Robotics Institute (see Section 7 below). Medical robotics is precisely the fruit that grew where these two foundations meet. This article proceeds from larger to smaller scales, from "robotic arms" to "robot swarms", tracing each development that has public sourcing, with figures and dates cited in place; the account runs to July 2026.

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# 2. The Multi-Scale Medical Robotics Center (MRC, InnoHK)

# Establishment: Asia's first one-stop R&D platform for surgical robots

According to a CUHK feature^※, the CUHK InnoHK centres page^※ and the InnoHK page^※, the Multi-Scale Medical Robotics Center (MRC) was conceived in 2017 by Professor Philip Chiu (赵伟仁) of the Faculty of Medicine and Professor Samuel Au (区智仁) of the Faculty of Engineering, and officially opened in 2020 as part of the AIR@InnoHK research cluster. The Centre houses a laboratory of roughly 8,000 square feet fitted with a simulated operating room and medical imaging equipment including MRI and 3D imaging; according to the sources, it is the second in the world and the first in Asia to offer one-stop pre-clinical R&D for surgical robots, supplying the pre-clinical data and medical evaluation that new surgical robots need to reach the market sooner.

The founding date can be pinned down further. Per the MRC's official "About Us" page^※, the Centre was jointly established by CUHK's Faculty of Medicine and Faculty of Engineering in April 2020, in partnership with leading overseas institutions including ETH Zürich, Imperial College London, Johns Hopkins University and the Technical University of Munich. This list of partners is no ornament — the transcontinental magnetic endoscopy described below came out of the collaboration with ETH, the London end of the intercontinental telesurgery sits at Imperial College, and the simulator used for surgical automation was developed jointly with Johns Hopkins. In other words, MRC was from the outset a Hong Kong node in a transnational collaboration network.

Per the same official page, MRC's three R&D lines carry precise titles: an "intraluminal multi-scale robotic platform integrating diagnosis and therapy", a "magnetically guided intraluminal robotic platform" and "image-guided robotic intervention". The Centre positions itself as more than a laboratory — it describes itself as a "medical robotics incubation hub" that nurtures start-ups, offers surgical-robot training, undertakes pre-clinical evaluation and drives technology commercialisation. Geographically it sits in the Hong Kong Science Park, occupying about 12,000 square feet per the sources, roughly 15 minutes' drive from the Prince of Wales Hospital and CUHK Medical Centre — close enough to rush prototypes into clinical trials. Its hybrid operating room is equipped with MRI and an Artis Zeego robotic C-arm X-ray imaging system, enabling real-time intraoperative imaging in the development of robotic interventions — a facility said to be unique in Asia.

What the "one-stop platform" means: developing a surgical robot spans engineering, clinical practice and regulation. MRC concentrates all of these on one platform — clinicians, engineers and researchers can collaborate across disciplines and move from concept, through prototype, to pre-clinical evaluation "in one stop", sharply shortening the journey from laboratory to clinic.

# The three research directions and the hybrid operating room

Per the CUHK InnoHK centres page^※, MRC supports three research directions: the intraluminal multi-scale robotic platform (for diagnosis and therapy), the magnetically guided intraluminal robotic platform, and image-guided robotic intervention. In addition, MRC operates a hybrid operating room — said to be unique in Asia, devoted entirely to the development and pre-clinical evaluation of new surgical robots and medical devices, making it possible "to test robots in an environment close to real surgery".

The name "Multi-Scale" points to the Centre's central ambition: advancing medical robotics across scales, from macroscopic surgical arms to microscopic magnetically guided intraluminal robots. MRC is also one of CUHK's six InnoHK centres (see State Key Laboratories).

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# 3. Fifteen years of endoscopic robotics: from Singapore collaboration to EndoMaster

Philip Wai-Yan Chiu (赵伟仁) is a leading figure in the new generation of minimally invasive and robotic endoscopy, and currently Dean of the CUHK Faculty of Medicine and Director of the CUHK Jockey Club Minimally Invasive Surgical Skills Centre. The core proposition of his team fits in a single sentence: use endoscopic treatment to replace open surgery for early cancers and lesions of the digestive tract, so patients need not carry an abdominal scar. The hardest bone to chew on this path is endoscopic submucosal dissection (ESD) — peeling a whole patch of early-cancer mucosa off the wall of the gut using a flexible endoscope: delicate work, with a steep learning curve and a high risk of perforation. Robotisation is exactly what gives this craft a steadier hand.

This was not achieved overnight. Per a CUHK press release^※, CUHK has collaborated with researchers in Singapore since 2010 on a flexible endoscopic robotic system designed to make ESD safer and more efficient; in 2011 the team used the first-generation prototype to perform robotic ESD on early gastric cancer. After nearly a decade of refinement, in May 2020 the team used the EndoMaster EASE (Endoluminal Access Surgical Efficacy) system to complete what is described as the world's first colorectal ESD robotic surgery — the first six patients were treated with no perforations, and resumed normal eating and were discharged within one to two days of surgery. Professor Chiu's description is that the system can retract tissue while maintaining a clear view, thereby making submucosal dissection safer. By 2019, the endoscopy centre at the Prince of Wales Hospital alone had already treated more than 150 patients with colorectal ESD for early lesions — solid clinical soil for robotisation.

Why a "flexible endoscopic robot" and not a da Vinci: the da Vinci familiar to the public is a rigid robotic arm that enters through ports in the abdominal wall. The ESD robot instead takes the natural-orifice route — entering through the mouth or anus — and must operate steadily inside a curved, peristaltic, mucus-lined digestive tract, an engineering challenge wholly different from that of a surgical arm. This is the differentiation that made CUHK's approach a "world first".

# A two-decade trajectory of "less invasion"

String Professor Chiu's team's milestones together and they trace a continuous trajectory towards "less invasion". Per a CUHK Department of Surgery profile^※, in 2004 he was the first in Hong Kong to perform ESD for early digestive cancers, and in 2010 he completed Hong Kong's first peroral endoscopic myotomy (POEM) for oesophageal motility disorders — again, an approach with "no scar on the body surface". Then came the first robotic gastric ESD in 2011 and the first robotic colorectal ESD in 2020, both mentioned above. Behind these "Hong Kong firsts / world firsts" lies one obsession: shrinking the wound from "an incision" to "an endoscope", and then to "a robot". He is currently Dean of the CUHK Faculty of Medicine, and also holds the Shun Hing Professorship in Robotic Surgery and the directorship of the Institute of Digestive Disease; in 2023 he received the Karl-Storz–Harold Hopkins "Golden Telescope" Award at the Hamlyn Symposium on Medical Robotics and a Jury Gold Medal at the Geneva International Exhibition of Inventions, and was elected a Fellow of Academia Europaea.

Beyond the robots, the team has also worked on cleverer technique. According to an ex vivo crossover study (indexed by PMC)^※, their magnetic countertraction ESD (MAG-ESD) — an internal magnet delivered through the endoscope channel with an external magnet mounted on a robotic arm, the magnetic force lifting the mucosa to facilitate dissection — can shorten procedure time by a significant ~20.4% and reduce complications such as perforation and muscularis injury. This "magnetic anchoring" idea is the clinical expression of one of MRC's three research lines, the "magnetically guided intraluminal robotic platform".

# AI enters the endoscopy suite too

Running alongside the robotics is artificial intelligence inside the endoscope. Per a CUHK Medicine announcement^※, CUHK has shown that AI-assisted colonoscopy can raise the adenoma detection rate by around 40% — adenomas being the precancerous lesions of colorectal cancer, each one found being one more risk intercepted. The team has also trained a new AI platform to spot hard-to-see flat-type early gastric cancers, assisting both treatment of early gastrointestinal cancers and the training of endoscopists. The robot supplies a steady "hand", the AI a sharp "eye", and the two meet in the same endoscopy suite.

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# 4. Surgical robots and intercontinental telesurgery

If the endoscopic robots answer "how to do better inside a lumen", the surgical robots and telesurgery ask whether "distance itself can be flattened". Recent landmark results include:

• Intercontinental telesurgery (three cities, 20,000 km, 2025): per a CUHK Medicine announcement^※ and a CUHK Office of Academic Links feature^※, the CUHK Faculty of Medicine, together with Renji Hospital affiliated with Shanghai Jiao Tong University School of Medicine and Imperial College London, used CUHK's self-developed remote laparoscopic robotic platform to perform a gastrectomy with lymph node dissection of the stomach and oesophagus on a porcine model, spanning 20,000 km across three cities. The Hong Kong end hosted the core surgical system carrying the model and supervised in real time throughout; the London (Imperial College) and Shanghai (Renji) ends each manipulated the robot remotely. What this exercise validated was not "cutting well" but the operational stability, system reliability and collaborative efficiency of multi-site, multi-country surgery under geographically and environmentally disparate conditions.
• Transcontinental magnetic endoscopy (CUHK × ETH Zürich): per a CUHK Medicine announcement^※, CUHK and ETH Zürich have completed what is described as the world's first in-vivo teleoperated magnetic endoscopy experiment on an animal model, across a distance of roughly 9,300 km between Zürich and Hong Kong. A magnetic endoscope, in essence, replaces the conventional flexible endoscope with a capsule or probe that an external magnetic field can tug and steer — the doctor no longer pushes the shaft but lets magnetism "lead" it through the lumen. Coupling this magnetic control with teleoperation means an operator in Europe can guide an endoscope inside an animal in Hong Kong from across a continent; what was tested was controllability under the combined complexity of magnetic guidance and long-distance operation.
• Multi-specialty clinical trial of a single-port robotic surgical system: per a CUHK Medicine announcement^※, CUHK has completed the world's first multi-specialty clinical trial using a next-generation single-port robotic surgical system. "Single-port" means the entire set of robotic arms enters through a single incision in the body, pushing trauma down to an absolute minimum.
• Open-source software infrastructure: per the CUHK InnoHK centres page^※, in 2021 the research team open-sourced its embodied-AI software infrastructure for surgery to the global surgical-robotics research community; per the source it has since been adopted by numerous leading research institutions worldwide.

What "telesurgery" means: completing a telesurgery or teleoperated endoscopy across more than 10,000 km shifts "surgical robots" from "a hospital tool" towards "medical infrastructure that spans distance". In principle, patients in remote regions could be treated by specialists on other continents working through robots — provided network latency is low enough and the system reliable enough, precisely what the experiments above repeatedly set out to test. It should be said that these intercontinental experiments are, at this stage, mostly on animal or ex vivo models, and constitute feasibility validation of the technology and workflow; there remains a regulatory and safety path before routine clinical use in humans.

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# 5. Surgical automation and embodied intelligence: from "remote control" to "autonomy"

Telesurgery still needs a human at the other end moving the arms. The further question: can the robot carry out parts of a procedure itself? CUHK's latest answer came on 6 August 2025. Per a CUHK Medicine announcement^※, the University's newly built embodied intelligence platform completed what is described as the world's first multi-task surgical automation test on a live animal: the robot autonomously performed tissue retraction, gauze grasping and vascular clipping — three distinct operations.

The system is led by Professor Dou Qi (窦琪) of the Department of Computer Science and Engineering, with Dr. Yip Hon-chi (叶汉基) of surgery conducting the animal tests; both MRC co-directors, Philip Chiu and Samuel Au, are also among the team. Two technical points are worth recording. First, the system works purely from endoscopic images with no additional sensors, fusing vision foundation models, reinforcement learning and visual servoing. Second, after training in the SurRoL simulator developed with Johns Hopkins University, the policy transfers zero-shot to the real robot with no further training. The work was published in 《Science Robotics》^※.

The line from "remote control" to "autonomy" is a watershed. Current automation remains confined to assistive, low-risk sub-steps — retraction, grasping — while the core decisions to cut and to suture remain with the surgeon. Handing these sub-tasks to the robot aims to ease the operator's burden and improve consistency on repetitive motions — not to replace the surgeon.

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# 6. Micro/nano and magnetically controlled robots: the Li Zhang team

Shrink the scale further, and we enter the domain of Li Zhang (张立), Professor in the CUHK Department of Mechanical and Automation Engineering, who has long worked on magnetically controlled micro/nanorobots and robot swarms — millions of micron-scale particles acting in concert under an external magnetic field, like a disciplined swarm of "iron bees".

Swarm navigation and localisation in blood vessels. Per a CUHK press release^※, Li Zhang's team has proposed a new strategy for real-time control and tracking of microrobotic swarms inside blood vessels: magnetic micro-swarms driven by a rotating permanent magnet can form and navigate near the vessel wall, exploiting reduced drag from the wall and strong interactions between nanoparticles to navigate upstream and downstream in flowing blood. The rotating swarm disturbs the motion of blood cells and disrupts normal blood flow, so it can be captured by Doppler ultrasound imaging and tracked in real time. Combined with ultrasound localisation, this is an important intermediate step from fundamental microrobot research towards clinical applications such as active targeted drug delivery and localised therapy.

Aneurysm embolisation: letting microgels "fill the gap" themselves. Per a CUHK Medicine announcement^※, in May 2023 Li Zhang and a team led by Professor Simon Yu (余俊豪) of the Faculty of Medicine published an "interventional catheterisation-integrated swarming microrobotic platform": self-adhesive microgels made of pH-responsive hydrogel, magnetic nanoparticles and a contrast agent are delivered by catheter and, under real-time image guidance, can still selectively aggregate in high-speed blood flow of 20 cm per second, achieving a filling rate above 95%. An acidic solution then activates their self-adhesion, fusing the microgels into a single block that seals the aneurysm; the self-adhesive stability is said to last over six months. The work was published in Science Advances. Ruptured aneurysms can carry mortality rates as high as four in ten in some locations — that is the point of a minimally invasive embolisation route of this kind.

Mapping the vascular system. More recently, the team has let the swarms find their own way. In a paper in 《Nature Machine Intelligence》(2025)^※, the team proposes an active-exploration strategy in which microrobot swarms explore and three-dimensionally reconstruct vascular networks, overcoming the difficulty of imaging upstream branches and obstructed flow — the robots are no longer merely guided tools but are becoming "surveyors".

Letting the "iron bees" make their own decisions. Beyond scale, the other through-line is autonomy. Per a CUHK in Touch report^※, Li Zhang and Dou Qi's teams proposed in 2022, in Nature Machine Intelligence, an AI-driven navigation system that lets millions of magnetic particles roughly 400 nanometres in diameter (about one two-hundredth of a human hair) navigate autonomously and adaptively, reconfiguring their formation like a swarm of bees. The team also borrowed from autonomous driving to propose a Level 0 to 4 autonomy classification for micro-robot swarms, together with three swarm configurations. Target applications include intravascular drug delivery for ischaemic stroke and minimally invasive treatment of deep tumour lesions — pushing "a swarm of iron bees entering blood vessels to deliver drugs" from science fiction into an engineering problem.

In addition, per a CUHK Medicine announcement^※, CUHK has also developed biohybrid soft microrobots with a rapid intraluminal delivery strategy for gastrointestinal diseases.

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# 7. The wider picture: Liu Yun-hui, T Stone and logistics robotics

Medicine is only one branch of CUHK's robotics. Underpinning the whole discipline is the Faculty of Engineering's robotics establishment. Per the CUHK InnoHK Logistics Robotics centre page^※ and a CUHK people feature^※, Professor Yun-hui Liu (刘云辉) of the Department of Mechanical and Automation Engineering — holder of the Choh-Ming Li Professorship in Mechanical and Automation Engineering — became Director of the CUHK T Stone Robotics Institute in 2016, and founded the Hong Kong Centre for Logistics Robotics (HKCLR) under InnoHK, working on machine vision and autonomous manipulation to develop robotic solutions for pain points in e-commerce, warehousing and similar industries. His long-term direction could be summarised as "making robots see, and work autonomously".

Liu's academic record also speaks to the depth of this line. Per his CUHK MAE faculty profile^※, he received a BEng in Applied Dynamics from the Beijing Institute of Technology in 1985, an MEng in Mechanical Engineering from Osaka University in 1989, and a PhD in Mathematical Engineering and Information Physics from the University of Tokyo in 1992. After graduation he was a researcher at the Electrotechnical Laboratory of Japan's Ministry of International Trade and Industry, joined CUHK in 1995, and was promoted to Professor in 2002. He has long worked on visual robotics — making robots "see, grasp and manipulate autonomously" — a capability that serves both warehouse sorting and, in a feedback loop, the recognition and localisation of tissue on the operating table. HKCLR extends its base into the Hong Kong-Shenzhen Innovation and Technology Park (Futian) in the Loop, developing solutions for the logistics industry's most pressing pain points.

The T Stone Institute is the backdrop against which to read MRC: it is the Faculty of Engineering's sustained accumulation in robotics that gave "the robot at the operating table" its engineering foundation. CUHK's robotics map is thus a triangle of "medical (MRC) + logistics (HKCLR) + disciplinary hub (T Stone)", sharing the institutional platform of InnoHK (the full list of six centres appears in State Key Laboratories). Engineering and medicine here are not parallel lines: the visual servoing used in surgical automation and the imaging-and-localisation on which micro-nano swarms rely are, at bottom, the same craft of robotic perception and control.

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# 8. From laboratory to operating table: the home-grown surgical robot lands

Beyond platforms and papers, the ultimate measure of medical robotics is "have real patients actually used it?". An answer is already taking shape. Per a Hospital Management Asia report^※, CUHK Medical Centre has introduced the Sentire® surgical robotic system, developed by the local company Cornerstone Robotics together with the CUHK Faculty of Medicine — described as one of the most complex robot-assisted surgical platforms developed in Hong Kong. The system entered clinical use in August 2022; by the time of the report it had completed more than 160 procedures across urology, general surgery, colorectal and upper gastrointestinal specialties, with plans to extend to gynaecology, thoracic, hepato-pancreato-biliary and cardiac surgery. An accompanying robotic-surgery subsidy scheme has funded about 90 of these procedures, benefiting some 200 patients. The research team is also using the system as a vehicle to explore the clinical deployment of the embodied AI described above.

This is the practical footnote to MRC's "incubation hub" positioning: the Centre is not satisfied with publishing papers and collecting "world firsts" — it wants to push robots all the way to the operating table and into patients' consultation rooms. From government funding via InnoHK, to the pre-clinical laboratory at the Science Park, to a local start-up's commercialised product and a public subsidy scheme, a chain of "basic research → platform evaluation → industrial translation → clinical accessibility" has been preliminarily closed — this is also the University's customary "platform-based R&D driving industrial translation" research strategy applied to robotics (compare the case of SenseTime and others in Research Output and Spin-offs).

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# 9. Selected achievements at a glance

Compared with CUHK's other world-class results (optical fibre, network coding, NIPT, SenseTime), medical robotics' distinctive character is "cross-disciplinary + clinical translation + platform-based infrastructure" — it rests on InnoHK, Hong Kong's flagship innovation and technology scheme, embodying CUHK's research strategy of "platform-based R&D driving industrial translation".

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# 10. A spectrum of scales: from robotic arms to "iron bees", and the road not yet finished

Pulling the threads together, CUHK's medical robotics is really a lineage arranged by scale: centimetre-scale surgical arms and single-port systems; millimetre-scale flexible endoscopes and magnetic endoscopes; micron-to-nanometre-scale intravascular robot swarms. At each order of magnitude down, the engineering logic changes entirely — robotic arms compete on precision and degrees of freedom; flexible endoscopes must hold steady in a peristaltic lumen; micro-nano swarms must pool their strength through magnetic fields and collective intelligence in flowing blood. Running through all of it is the same clinical theme: make trauma ever smaller, and push the reach of healthcare ever farther. That also explains why nearly every one of these results carries a "world first / Asia first" label — each stands at the frontier of its own scale.

It must also be said honestly that the road is not yet finished. Several of the "intercontinental" and "automation" breakthroughs above are, at this stage, still performed on animal or ex vivo models, constituting feasibility validation of technology and workflow; crossing into routine human clinical practice will require clearing regulatory approval, long-term safety data, cost and training hurdles. What has actually reached patients so far is mainly the ESD robot already in clinical use, the Sentire system, and AI-assisted endoscopy. In other words, CUHK offers both "world firsts in the laboratory" and "everyday usability at the operating table" — and the stretch between the two is exactly what the next decade of medical robotics has to fill. This engineering–medicine through-line echoes CUHK's accumulated strengths in Information and Engineering Breakthroughs and Life Sciences and Medical Breakthroughs, together forming one corner of the "strongest research" picture in the Overview of Research Achievements.

Further reading: Overview of Research Achievements, State Key Laboratories, Life Sciences and Medical Breakthroughs, Information and Engineering Breakthroughs, Research Output and Spin-offs.

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