South Africa’s first robot surgeon has arrived in Pretoria, and performed its first successful operation this week. The R17 million unit, named ‘Mthombo’, has been installed at the Urology Hospital and has been used to perform keyhole surgery.

The full story, with videos, is over on eNCA, and it’s well worth a read. The benefits of robotic surgery are huge – the controls allow surgeons to make much bigger movements with their hands than normal, but the robotic hand itself makes fewer, smaller cuts. The result is that there’s less extraneous damage to patients’ bodies and they heal much faster too.

According to the hospital, it’s taken this long for robo-surgeons to arrive in South Africa due to the high up-front cost of both the equipment and training. Operating theatre robots themselves aren’t especially knew, though – they’ve been in, um, operation around the world for the last 15 years. I knew an army surgeon in the UK who claimed to be able to control robots in Afghanistan from a shed at the bottom of his garden – although I never verified that for myself, remote surgery has also been around since 2001, so it’s entirely possible.

(Pic via Yodapedia)