TEHRAN A French surgical team led by a famous Iranian surgeon Professor Iraj Ganjbakhsh succeeded in performing a closed heart surgery by using a remote control robot equipped with a video camera. Ganjbakhsh is the head of the heart surgery department of a hospital in Paris. The operation, which took two and a half hours, was performed on a 60-year-old woman who was suffering from a serious heart problem.

The patient is recovering well and is expected to leave hospital on July 14 or 15. In May 1998, another French surgical team performed a heart surgery with the help of a computer-controlled robot, but it was an open heart surgery.