On July 2–3, 2025, MicroPort MedBot reported that Professor Rong Liu of PLA General Hospital completed two liver tumor resections using the Toumai Tele-Robotic Surgical System, with the surgeon operating from Xiong’an New Area in Hebei Province and the patients at a Beijing site — relayed through a low Earth orbit (LEO) satellite link with one-way latency under 60 ms, according to MicroPort MedBot. The company described this as the world’s first remote robotic surgery conducted via LEO satellite.
The Procedures
Professor Rong Liu leads hepatobiliary and pancreatic surgery at PLA General Hospital (301 Hospital) in Beijing, a major military medical institution. She has been the primary clinical operator in multiple of Toumai’s remote surgery milestones and was the lead surgeon for the April 2025 multi-site demonstration in which Toumai enabled five simultaneous telesurgeries across five Chinese hospitals from a single console at Ruijin Hospital in Shanghai.
The July 2–3 procedures were liver tumor resections — hepatectomies — a technically demanding category of laparoscopic surgery that requires precise dissection around major blood vessels and bile ducts. Choosing hepatectomy rather than a simpler procedure type reflects confidence in the system’s stability at the latency levels achievable over the LEO link.
Both patients were discharged the following day, according to MicroPort MedBot. No adverse events linked to the network link were reported by the company.
LEO vs. GEO: What Changes
To understand why a LEO satellite demonstration is technically notable, the distinction from conventional satellite communication matters.
Traditional satellite communication uses geostationary (GEO) orbit, where satellites sit approximately 35,786 km above the equator. At that altitude, the signal round-trip time to the satellite and back is approximately 500–600 ms — far too high for real-time surgical control, where latency above roughly 200 ms begins to compromise the operator’s ability to respond to tissue feedback in the expected timeframe.
LEO satellites operate at altitudes typically between 200 and 2,000 km. At that range, one-way latency to the satellite is on the order of 10–50 ms, with total round-trip communication times that can fall below 100 ms. The Toumai Tele-Robotic Surgical System already demonstrated sub-50 ms bidirectional latency for inter-provincial procedures over 5G and fiber links; adding LEO satellite expands the geographic reach of those latency characteristics to areas without 5G infrastructure or fiber capacity.
The engineering challenges with LEO are distinct from those with GEO. A single LEO satellite moves relative to any ground point — a Beijing-area ground station would typically have line-of-sight to a given satellite for only minutes before the orbit carries it below the horizon. Maintaining a continuous, stable surgical link requires either a constellation dense enough that handoff between satellites is seamless, or scheduling the procedure to a satellite window. MicroPort MedBot did not disclose which constellation was used or the specific handoff management approach for the July 2–3 sessions.
Atmospheric conditions also affect LEO links differently than GEO, and link margin management at surgical latency thresholds is an active area of satellite communication engineering. That the July procedures maintained one-way latency under 60 ms throughout the operations, according to MicroPort MedBot, indicates the link was stable enough to sustain real-time surgical control for the duration of each hepatectomy.
Multi-Link Architecture
The LEO capability announced in July 2025 added to an already multi-link-capable system. MicroPort MedBot describes the Toumai Tele-Robotic System as supporting five communication modalities: dedicated fiber lines, broadband internet, 5G mobile networks, GEO satellite, and — after the July 2025 sessions — LEO satellite.
This multi-link architecture has practical significance beyond engineering demonstration. Surgical centers in rural China, remote island hospitals, ship-board medical facilities, and disaster response field hospitals each represent environments where different link types are dominant or available. A system that can operate across all five means that a single approved platform can address the full spectrum of remote surgical scenarios, rather than requiring different configurations for different connectivity environments.
According to MicroPort MedBot, the Toumai Tele-Robotic System had completed nearly 500 remote surgical procedures with 100% success rate by the time of its NMPA commercial approval in May 2025 — two months before the LEO satellite sessions. The LEO sessions were conducted within an ongoing controlled clinical program rather than as part of the pre-approval trial, according to the company.
China’s Telesurgery Context
China has invested in telesurgery infrastructure at a scale that has no direct parallel elsewhere. The country’s combination of large geography, uneven specialist distribution, national 5G rollout ambitions, and active satellite constellation programs (including domestic LEO constellation development) creates a policy and infrastructure environment that accelerates practical deployment of remote surgical systems.
Toumai’s May 2025 NMPA commercial approval for tele-robotic surgery — not just research authorization but commercial clinical authorization — represents the furthest any tele-surgery platform has progressed into routine deployment, according to MicroPort MedBot. Other remote surgery demonstrations in other countries have typically remained in research or limited pilot status.
Earlier in 2025, before the LEO demonstration, MicroPort MedBot had already expanded the documented range of Toumai’s remote surgery use:
- April 22, 2025: Five simultaneous telesurgeries across five Chinese hospitals from a single console, spanning hepatic, pancreatic, urological, gastrointestinal, and biliary cases, with patients in Fujian, Yunnan, Jiangxi, Hainan, and Shanghai.
- Prior sessions: Ultra-remote lung tumor resection; serial remote prostatectomy procedures in Africa.
By October 2025, cumulative global commercial orders for the Toumai laparoscopic robot line reached 100 units; by December, the count exceeded 160 with installations in nearly 40 countries across Asia, Europe, Africa, and the Americas, according to MicroPort MedBot.
What LEO Satellite Telesurgery Is Not
The July 2025 sessions established that real-time robotic surgery over a LEO satellite link is technically feasible and was executed safely by an experienced surgical team. Several limitations and open questions remain.
Routine clinical deployment via LEO satellite would require consistent satellite coverage, which depends on constellation density and ground station infrastructure. The cost per session of satellite bandwidth for real-time surgical video and control signals is not publicly reported by the company and will influence where and how often the capability is used in practice.
The procedures demonstrated were performed by Professor Rong Liu, a highly experienced hepatobiliary surgeon with substantial prior telesurgery experience using Toumai. The feasibility at this skill level does not automatically generalize to operators less experienced with telesurgical workflow.
MicroPort MedBot has not published independent peer-reviewed results for the LEO sessions. The figures and characterizations cited here come from the company’s own communications.
Significance for MicroPort MedBot’s Portfolio Strategy
For MicroPort MedBot, the LEO satellite demonstration reinforces the Toumai brand across multiple dimensions simultaneously. The tele-surgery capability is a differentiated feature relative to other approved laparoscopic robot platforms in China, none of which have equivalent remote surgery commercial clearance. Adding LEO extends the differentiation further into environments where 5G and fiber are unavailable.
The broader portfolio context matters too. By the time of the July sessions, MicroPort MedBot held six approved products, with a seventh — the UniPath bronchoscopic robot — approved in December 2025. The company’s strategy of building a multi-platform portfolio across laparoscopic, orthopedic, endovascular, single-port, dental navigation, and telesurgical categories positions it differently from competitors focused on a single product line. The tele-surgery milestone is part of that portfolio differentiation story, not a standalone event.
MicroPort MedBot’s Toumai product family now spans three approved variants: the standard Toumai multi-port laparoscopic robot, the Toumai SP single-port system, and the Toumai Tele-Robotic Surgical System. The LEO satellite capability demonstrated in July 2025 is a feature of the tele-robotic platform and operates on top of the surgical execution that the multi-port laparoscopic architecture provides.