PPUM and CelcomDigi demonstrated cross-border 5G AI HoloMedicine surgery

A surgical team at Universiti Malaya Medical Centre carried out a live ear, nose and throat procedure while specialists and medical students watched from multiple countries. CelcomDigi announced the demonstration on 15 December 2025 and described it as one of the world's first real-time, multi-country live surgeries using 5G-enabled AI HoloMedicine.[1]

The participating locations stretched from Malaysian states such as Putrajaya, Kedah, Johor and Sarawak to South Korea, Bhutan, the Philippines, Indonesia, Thailand and Singapore. In the United States, the announcement named Harvard Medical School, Mayo Clinic and Vanderbilt University Medical Centre among the institutions connected to the operating theatre.[1]

That makes the event a credible demonstration of remote surgical observation and collaboration. It is not yet evidence that AI made the operation safer, more accurate or clinically better. The release did not isolate which decisions were AI-assisted, publish technical benchmarks or report an independently evaluated patient outcome.[1]

The procedure was led by Professor Dr Mohd Zulkiflee bin Abu Bakar, UMMC director and head and neck oncosurgeon, together with Dr Julius Goh Liang Chye, a senior lecturer and clinical ENT specialist. Participants outside the theatre could observe important steps and exchange feedback while the procedure was taking place.[1]

CelcomDigi described smooth, synchronous, high-definition transmission with remote proctoring and two-way clinical feedback. Those are meaningful capabilities for surgical education because a remote specialist needs a clear, timely view and a dependable route back to the operating team. The release did not provide measured end-to-end latency, uptime, resolution, packet loss or contingency performance, so the network description remains a first-party account rather than a published engineering audit.[1]

The official operating-room photograph confirms a real clinical team and setting rather than a concept rendering. It does not show what the remote audience saw, how many participants stayed connected throughout, or whether every site received the same quality of feed.[1]

In the reported setup, 5G was the connectivity layer carrying the live transmission. XR was the immersive interface used to view and interact with clinical information beyond a conventional flat video call. HoloMedicine was the named platform that brought those elements into the remote collaboration workflow.[1][2]

The partners repeatedly described the platform as AI-powered, but the release did not say that an algorithm diagnosed the patient, selected the surgical plan or controlled the procedure. Readers should therefore understand the AI label as part of the platform description unless the partners later publish the specific model, input, output and clinician-override process used during the case.[1]

The groundwork was laid a year earlier. In December 2024, Universiti Malaya and CelcomDigi signed a three-year partnership to explore 5G, AI and XR in clinical care, operating theatres and medical education. The later surgery shows that the partnership progressed from a memorandum and demonstration equipment toward a live clinical teaching event.[2]

CelcomDigi said UMMC planned further urology, colorectal and ENT demonstrations. Repetition matters because a system that works once under launch-day supervision may perform differently across longer procedures, more users, busy networks and different clinical teams.[1]

A useful evaluation would track connection reliability, remote-participant engagement, teaching assessment scores, clinical-team workload, technical interruptions and the time needed to set up each case. It should also record whether specialists changed a decision through remote feedback and whether that intervention was appropriate. None of those proposed measures was reported in the checked announcement.[1]

Clinical governance is equally important. The partners would need clear rules for patient consent, who may join the feed, what data can be displayed or recorded, how remote advice is documented and who remains accountable in theatre. These are practical operating questions, not reasons to dismiss the demonstration. Publishing them would make the model easier for other Malaysian hospitals to evaluate responsibly.[1][2]