London doctor carries out remote robot surgery on cancer patient 1,500 miles away

What just happened? A surgeon in London has carried out what sounds like something straight from a sci-fi movie: remotely guiding a robot 1,500 miles away in Gibraltar to remove a man's cancerous prostate. The proceude means The London Clinic has become the first hospital in the UK to successfully conduct remote robot-assisted telesurgery on a patient.

The milestone procedure saw Professor Prokar Dasgupta, based at The London Clinic's robotic center in Harley Street, operate on 62-year-old patient Paul Buxton, who was in St Bernard's Hospital in Gibraltar, a British overseas territory in southern Spain.

Using the Toumai robotic surgical system, Dasgupta controlled four robotic arms and a 3D HD camera from a console in the UK, with just 60 milliseconds of latency between his movements and the robot's response.

That delay is small enough to make the surgery feel close to real-time, which is ...