22/08/2026
A full house at IRCAD-Taiwan/ AITS this week.
The lab was packed and the energy around the Medtronic Hugo was the kind you only get when a course hits the exact question the room came to ask. Across the theoretical and hands-on blocks what unfolded was less a product demonstration than a working exchange between a technology and the surgeons learning to push it.
The clearest moment came during the live the cadaver lab, watching Dr. David Chen work through the scenario on the Medtronic Hugo system.
What stands out about the platform in a teaching environment is the way it is designed around the room rather than around a single operator. The surgeon's head is not enclosed; the display stays open and visible to everyone standing around the table. In a training setting that changes everything, because the faculty see what the operator sees, participants follow the anatomy in real time, and the teaching happens in the room instead of through a relay.
The open architecture matters for a second reason. Because the system leaves the space around the patient clear, moving from robotic to open surgery mid-demonstration is immediate — the faculty can step in, show the same manoeuvre by hand, and step back, all without breaking the flow of the case. For a course built on comparison and repetition, that continuity is worth more than any single feature.
This is also where the value of the partnership sits. In a lab scenario, Medtronic and IRCAD are both there to experiment, and both are learning from the other. Engineers and faculty build the scenarios together, surface new problems in the process, and solve them in the same room over the same days. That is what cooperation between a brand and an institution should look like: not a placement, but a shared workbench.
