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

Completing a surgical operation over a distance of more than ten thousand kilometres signals that top-tier medical capability may soon transcend geography—patients in remote regions could, in principle, be treated by a specialist on another continent via a robot. Medical robotics is the most visibly prominent engineering–medicine crossover field at CUHK over the past decade and more. This article traces the threads of the Multi-Scale Medical Robotics Center (MRC) under InnoHK, endoscopic/surgical robotics, micro/nanorobots, and intercontinental telesurgery; figures and dates are sourced on the spot. The research scale stretches from centimetre-level surgical robots all the way down to micro/nano-scale swarms.

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

CUHK's robotics research spans the Faculty of Medicine (surgery, endoscopy) and the Faculty of Engineering (Department of Mechanical and Automation Engineering), with the InnoHK-affiliated Multi-Scale Medical Robotics Center (MRC) serving as the collaborative platform. It brings together two of CUHK's strongest disciplines—Engineering (robotics, information engineering) and Medicine (clinical practice)—extending the University's tradition of integrating teaching, research, and clinical care. This time, though, there is a robot standing beside the operating table.

# 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 article^※, the CUHK InnoHK Centres official page^※, and the InnoHK official page^※, the Multi-Scale Medical Robotics Center (MRC) was first conceived in 2017 by Professor Philip Chiu (趙偉仁) of the Faculty of Medicine and Professor Samuel Au (區智仁) of the Faculty of Engineering and officially opened in 2020, as part of the AIR@InnoHK research cluster. The centre houses an approximately 8,000 sq. ft. laboratory equipped with a simulated operating theatre and medical imaging equipment including MRI and 3D imaging. According to published sources, it is the world's second and Asia's first one-stop platform for pre-clinical R&D of surgical robots, providing pre-clinical data and medical evaluation to accelerate the journey of new surgical robots towards the market.

What "one-stop platform" means: the development of a surgical robot spans engineering, clinical, and regulatory domains. The MRC brings these stages together onto a single platform—clinicians, engineers, and researchers can collaborate across disciplines here, moving from concept and prototype through to pre-clinical evaluation in a "one-stop" fashion, dramatically shortening the cycle from lab to clinic.

# Three core research directions and the Hybrid Operating Room

According to the CUHK InnoHK Centres official page^※, the MRC supports three core research directions: endoluminal multi-scale robotic platforms (for diagnosis and therapy), magnetically guided endoluminal robotic platforms, and image-guided robotic intervention. Additionally, the MRC houses a Hybrid Operating Room—reported to be a one-of-a-kind facility in Asia, fully dedicated to the R&D 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" signals the centre's core aspiration: to advance medical robotics technology across different scales, from macroscopic surgical arms down to microscopic, magnetically steered endoluminal robots. The MRC is also one of six CUHK InnoHK Centres (see also State Key Laboratories).

# 3. Endoscopic / surgical robotics: The Philip Chiu team and intercontinental telesurgery

Philip Wai-Yan Chiu is a leading figure in the new generation of minimally invasive and robotic endoscopy, and is currently Dean of the CUHK Faculty of Medicine. His team has long worked on using endoscopic therapy to replace open surgery for treating lesions of the digestive tract, and on developing robotic systems capable of performing endoscopic submucosal dissection (ESD). Flagship achievements in recent years include:

• Intercontinental telesurgery (three cities, 20,000 km, 2025): According to a CUHK Medicine press release^※, CUHK collaborated with Renji Hospital (affiliated with Shanghai Jiao Tong University School of Medicine) and the Royal Marsden Hospital (London), using a CUHK-developed telerobotic laparoscopic platform to perform a gastric resection spanning 20,000 km across three cities, verifying the technical and clinical feasibility of complex remote cancer surgery.
• Intercontinental magnetically-guided endoscopy (CUHK × ETH Zurich): According to a CUHK Medicine press release^※, CUHK and ETH Zurich completed what is reported to be the world's first in vivo teleoperated magnetic endoscopy experiment on an animal model, over a distance of approximately 9,300 km between Zurich and Hong Kong.
• Multi-specialty clinical trial of a single-port robotic surgical system: According to a CUHK Medicine press release^※, CUHK completed the world's first multi-specialty clinical trial using a next-generation single-port robotic surgical system.
• Open-source software infrastructure: According to the CUHK InnoHK Centres official page^※, the research team open-sourced surgical embodied AI software infrastructure to the global surgical robotics research community in 2021, since adopted by multiple renowned research institutions worldwide, according to the source.

What "telesurgery" means: completing a surgical or endoscopic procedure over more than ten thousand kilometres transforms the "surgical robot" from a "support tool within a hospital" into a "medical infrastructure that spans distance."

# 4. Micro/nanorobots: The Li Zhang team

Li Zhang (張立) is a professor in CUHK's Department of Mechanical and Automation Engineering, with a long-standing research focus on magnetically controlled micro/nanorobots and robotic swarms. According to a CUHK press release^※, Zhang's team proposed a new strategy for the 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 vascular boundary, relying on reduced blood-flow resistance and strong inter-particle interactions to achieve upstream and downstream navigation in flowing blood. Combined with ultrasound imaging for localisation, this represents a crucial intermediate step from fundamental micro-robot research towards clinical applications such as active targeted drug delivery and localised therapy.

Additionally, according to a CUHK Medicine press release^※, CUHK has also developed biohybrid soft microrobots with a rapid endoluminal delivery strategy for gastrointestinal diseases.

# 5. Selected key achievements at a glance

Compared with CUHK's other world-class achievements—optical fibre, network coding, NIPT, SenseTime—medical robotics is uniquely characterised by its "cross-disciplinary + clinical translation + platform-type infrastructure" nature. It rests upon InnoHK, Hong Kong's flagship innovation and technology initiative, and exemplifies CUHK's research strategy of "driving industrial translation through platform-based R&D."

Further reading: Overview of Research Achievements, State Key Laboratories, Breakthroughs in Life Sciences and Medicine, Breakthroughs in Information and Engineering.