Surgery by Fiber Optic: A New Long-Distance Record

SS Innovations set a new telesurgery distance record, operating between Colombia and India across 13,600 miles.

2 Aug 2026

Distance, in surgery, used to mean a colleague across the hall. SS Innovations International has stretched that definition considerably, with a team performing a robotic sleeve gastrectomy remotely between Colombia and India across more than 13,600 miles of fiber network. The July 29 procedure broke the company's own previous long-distance telesurgery record, using its SSi Mantra robotic system.

The surgeon operated from Hospital Internacional de Colombia in Bucaramanga, while the patient lay at Mohak Bariatrics and Robotics in Indore. The demonstration showed stable robotic control and haptic feedback across a transcontinental connection, the kind of feat that latency and secure data transmission have long made difficult.

It follows a separate showcase in which the company broadcast a live kidney telesurgery at the Society of Robotic Surgery's 2026 Annual Meeting in Florida. Both events serve the same purpose: proving that robotic platforms can work reliably over long distances in real clinical settings, not just in a laboratory.

Company leadership frames the achievement as part of a mission to decentralize surgical access, potentially bringing specialist-level care to regions without local surgeons. For hospitals evaluating robotics platforms, the message is that telesurgery is edging from proof of concept toward a feature vendors are building into commercial systems.