Building on a successful 3-year partnership originally established in 2021, the continuation of this partnership to 2027 expands the capacity to train cohorts of surgeon-nurse teams to become trainers themselves, making this minimally invasive surgical option available to many more patients around the world.
Each year, UC Davis Health surgeons will collaborate with colleagues at the International Robotic Surgery Training Center (IRSTC) at FAH-SYSU to deliver a train-the-trainer curriculum for up to 80 Chinese teams. IRSTC, established during the first project phase, is the first international robotic surgical training center in China and also the first to use actual Da Vinci robots to train surgeons. The surgeon-nurse teams trained at IRSTC will help disseminate state-of-the-art robotic surgery techniques to their colleagues through partner institutions affiliated with FAH-SYSU and the Training Center. The teams will focus on applying robotic surgery advances to different specialties, including cardiology, oncology, and obstetrics/gynecology.
In addition to the robotic surgery curriculum, the partnership supports seminars jointly offered by UC Davis and FAH-SYSU faculty, an annual award for Excellence in Robotic Surgery for an outstanding resident/trainee, a preceptorship program to mentor a Chinese physician at UC Davis Health, and a research program focused on applying AI to surgical robotics.
Collectively, these training activities and mentoring opportunities promise to raise the visibility of FAH-SYSU as a leader in robotic surgery training and practice, while sharing the expertise of skilled surgeons at both partner institutions more widely.
The partnership also supports the International Health Data Science/AI for Medicine Training Program, which builds expertise in health data science and artificial intelligence (AI) through seminars, collaborative research, and curriculum development. The initiative immerses new researchers from China and the United States in intensive research cycles that encourage them to explore ways to apply health data science and AI to explore different research questions in medicine. A Health Data Science curriculum component includes the development of training materials and tools that will be evaluated, refined, and made available to wider audiences in the future.
For more information, please contact Jolie Lam, Surgical Robotics and Health Data Science & AI for Medicine Program Director at CITRIS and the Banatao Institute at UC Berkeley (jolie.lam@citris-uc.org).
