On 1 to 2 August, a national training programme on AI-assisted therapy, orthopaedic surgical robots, was held in Pingshan, Shenzhen. It was hosted by the National Orthopaedics Medical Centre and Beijing Jishuitan Hospital, with seventy-four orthopaedic clinicians and technical staff from across China taking part.
It is the first time Jishuitan’s surgical-robot technology has reached a district-level hospital, a step to push national-grade medical resources down to the grassroots. Through the programme, Shenzhen Pingle Orthopaedics Hospital will plug into Jishuitan’s strategy of regional collaboration and standardised care, lifting local diagnosis and treatment.
Jishuitan vice president Yu Yang said the hospital, approved in 2025 as Beijing’s first AI-assisted therapy training base in orthopaedics, has trained specialists nationwide since 2017. The Beijing Orthopaedic Surgical Robot Engineering Research Centre, set up in 2021, is the bridge taking the technology from lab to clinic and from Beijing to the country.
During the session, experts from Jishuitan, Qingdao University Affiliated Hospital and Pingle guided robot-assisted total knee replacement. Courses covered making robot surgery routine, individualised planning, and spinal and paediatric applications.
The signal for the robotics sector: surgical robots are moving from high-end showcase to standard clinical tooling, and training throughput, not just hardware, is becoming the bottleneck for adoption.
Translated and adapted from Shenzhen News (sznews.com).