Two operations in Dhaka, and a machine that turned 360 degrees

Salehin, who heads the hospital's Endo-Laparoscopic and Robotic Surgery Department, led the first case: a robotic cholecystectomy on a man in his late fifties. The instrument was a Medbot Toumai Endoscopic Surgical Robot, its arms rotating a full 360 degrees, its cameras rendering the interior of the abdomen in three dimensions through incisions barely wider than a fingertip. The surgeon sat at a console metres away. Nothing about the machine was autonomous; every movement began in a human hand.

Shelly's patient was a 45-year-old woman with abnormal uterine bleeding, and the operation was a robotic hysterectomy. Both procedures are the standard opening moves for a new robotic programme anywhere in the world — predictable anatomy, high volume, well-mapped risks.

Salehin described the gains in the plain vocabulary of his trade: better protection of blood vessels, less bleeding, faster recovery. The man with the gallstones, he said, would likely go home within a day or two.

The ambition behind the evening is larger than two operations. Shelly said the hospital intends to extend robotic surgery into cardiac, neurosurgical, urological, general, gynaecological and thoracic work. The stated aim is to keep Bangladeshi patients from boarding planes.

That journey has been a fixture of the country's medical life for decades. Hospitals in Kolkata, Chennai and Vellore, and clinics in Bangkok and Singapore, have long treated large numbers of Bangladeshi patients, most of them paying from their own pockets — out-of-pocket payments cover roughly two-thirds of health spending in Bangladesh, among the highest shares in Asia. When India sharply reduced visa issuance in 2024, that route narrowed considerably.

Bangladesh comes late to this. India performed its first robot-assisted procedure in 2002 in New Delhi; Pakistan followed in 2019 in Lahore; Sri Lanka and Nepal arrived before Dhaka. The Toumai, built by Shanghai MicroPort Medbot, is itself a latecomer — a lower-cost challenger to Intuitive Surgical's da Vinci, which has held the field since its clearance in 2000 and whose patents only began expiring late in the last decade.

The lineage of the technology runs oddly. The da Vinci descends from a 1980s United States Army project meant to let surgeons operate on wounded soldiers from behind the front line. MicroPort has since demonstrated telesurgery over 5G across more than 5,000 kilometres, between Chinese cities and North Africa.

None of that was in the room on Madani Avenue. There were two patients, two surgeons, and a set of mechanical arms doing exactly what they were told.