In April 2026 Severance Hospital performed its 50,000th robot-assisted operation, a milestone no single medical institution had reached before, in Korea or anywhere else. The case itself was emblematic of why the technology matters: a robot-assisted partial nephrectomy by urology professor Ham Wonsik, director of the hospital's Robot Endoscopic Surgery Center, removing only the tumour from a 65-year-old kidney cancer patient and preserving the organ.
The trajectory tells a story of accelerating adoption. Severance introduced robotic surgery to Korea in 2005, took eight years to reach 10,000 cases, and then compounded: 20,000 by 2018, 30,000 by 2021, 40,000 by 2024, and the final 10,000 in roughly 28 months. Single-port procedures, which operate through one incision and suit narrow, deep anatomy such as thyroid and oral cancers, grew from about 2 percent of robotic cases in 2018 to 47 percent at the milestone. The hospital runs 12 surgical robots and two training robots, including five single-port models, the most in Korea.
The caseload spans surgical disciplines at 48 percent, led by thyroid and endocrine surgery, with urology at 34 percent, otolaryngology at 10 percent and obstetrics and gynaecology at 6 percent. The institution's academic footprint matches the clinical one: a 2025 study in the Journal of Robotic Surgery found Yonsei published more robot-assisted surgery papers than any institution worldwide from 2014 to 2023, with 196, and more than 2,300 physicians from 43 countries have trained at the hospital since 2008.