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Saudi Hospital Performs First Fully Robotic Liver Transplant
The groundbreaking surgery paves the way for future medical innovation.
King Faisal Specialist Hospital & Research Center’s (KFSH&RC) Organ Transplant Center of Excellence (OTCoE) in Riyadh, KSA, has successfully completed a groundbreaking surgery — a liver transplant performed entirely by robots.
The donor recipient, a 66-year-old Saudi male battling non-alcoholic liver cirrhosis and hepatocellular carcinoma, was treated on September 6th. The man is the first in a long line of future patients who will benefit from fully robotic transplants at the Saudi facility.
While other surgical establishments have experimented with minimally invasive liver transplants using hybrid robotic techniques, KFSH&RC is the only one to successfully perform a fully robotic liver transplant. The high-tech machinery enables surgeons to make smaller incisions, allowing for faster recoveries and radically reduced rates of post-op complications and infections.
Dr. Dieter Broering, Executive Director of the Organ Transplant Center of Excellence at KFSH&RC, noted: “With this remarkable feat, we at KFSH&RC reaffirm our commitment to pushing the boundaries of medical innovation and enhancing the quality of healthcare services offered to patients worldwide. The successful implementation of fully robotic liver transplants marks a pivotal moment in the history of organ transplantation and firmly positions KFSH&RC as a world-leading center in this field”.
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The KFSH&RC Robotic Surgery Program and its Da Vinci Xi robots now operate across several surgical departments:
- Gynecology, including operating on uterine cancers, benign hysterectomies, and myomectomies.
- Urology, for the treatment of kidney, ureter, bladder, and prostate tumors.
- Neurology, where electrodes are implanted into the brains of patients suffering refractory epilepsy and hemispherectomies.
KFSH&RC is now recognized as a leading Training Center for robotic transplants, opening the doors to collaborations with other medical institutions and driving global progress in minimally invasive surgeries.
News
Visa’s Return To Syria Starts With A Test And A Bank In Lebanon
Foreign visitors will be the first users to benefit, but whether Syria’s own banks and cardholders follow is still an open question.
Visa is returning to Syria. Its first live international card transaction in the country was a test rather than a launch, and the milestone event ran through a Lebanese bank.
The acquirer (the bank on the merchant’s side of a card payment) was Fransabank Lebanon, with Paymera as the other named partner. Nadim Moujaes, who heads a Fransabank Group subsidiary, describes the test as both the culmination of “longstanding efforts to link Syria back to international payment networks” and “the first step in a larger path”.
Syrian President Ahmed Al-Sharaa makes the first electronic payment in Syria using a @Visa card at a store in Damascus, following the lifting of US sanctions on Syria. pic.twitter.com/lpAN7nQ6Fc
— Tech Magazine (@TechMGZN) August 27, 2026
“We are excited to have successfully tested live transactions today as we plan to enable international visitors to use their Visa cards while in Syria,” says Leila Serhan, Visa’s senior vice president and group country manager for the North Africa, Levant and Pakistan region. Although a significant first step, that plan doesn’t come with a hard date for when a visitor’s card will work normally.
Mohammed Safwat Raslan, governor of the Central Bank of Syria, says the test paves the way for international card acceptance in Syria and that maintaining strong compliance, risk management and operational controls will remain essential. Serhan likewise stresses that Visa has worked within applicable legal, regulatory and compliance requirements. For a test transaction, it seems there was a great deal of attention paid to the rules, with the entire operation being carefully managed.
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The test is the latest step in a sequence that began in December 2025, when Visa announced a strategic roadmap to support Syria’s integration into the global digital economy. In February 2026 it hosted its first industry gathering of banks, ecosystem partners and policymakers in Damascus and, the same month, signed an agreement with Syria’s Ministry of Communications and Information Technology in San Francisco.
Michel Kattouah, Paymera’s CEO, called the test “the return of international card acceptance,” but while that’s positive news, there’s no word yet on when a Syrian bank will issue a Visa card to a Syrian customer.
Visa’s Return To Syria Starts With A Test And A Bank In Lebanon
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