To get a better idea of how medical technology is transforming the face of healthcare, let's bring in our medical correspondent Li Qiuyuan.

Q1. Medical technology is progressing so fast, that sometimes it seems more like science fiction rather than science fact.  But fantasy is becoming closer to reality than many people think. Besides the surgical robots you covered, what other advanced medical technologies are having a direct impact on patient care?

A1. Zou Yue, medical technologies are getting weirder by the day, but I mean that in a good way. Here are a few examples. Take a look at the I-Knife. It’s a surgical knife that actually vaporizes tissue, and then analyzes the smoke, so that a surgeon can know if she’s cutting into cancerous cells or healthy tissue.

And then we have nanobots that could possibly cure cancer. A team of scientists from Israel started human trials including drug-delivering nanobots in early 2016. Unlike chemotherapy and radiation therapy, which damage healthy and cancerous cells alike, DNA nanobots target cancer cells only, greatly reducing the harm to surrounding tissue. If this technology continues to see success, it will completely revolutionize the way we treat disease.

And what about using young blood to halt aging? Years of animal experiments have shown that an infusion of young blood in older mice can improve their cognition, physical endurance and the health of several organs. It even makes them look physically younger. The implication of this discovery is vast, ranging from curing Alzheimer's to heart disease to cell degeneration. Last but certainly not the least, the head transplant. Yes you heard me right.

The world’s first head transplant is currently scheduled to be carried out on a Chinese patient in December 2017, according to Italian neurosurgeon Sergio Canavero. He will work with Dr. Ren Xiaoping from Harbin Medical University in northeast China’s  Heilongjiang province, who has performed over 1,000 head transplants using mice. Presumably, their first volunteer patient would be a 64-year-old Chinese man, Wang Huaming, paralyzed from neck down from a wrestling injury, though previous reports suggested it would be Russian computer scientist Valery Spiridonov.

The operation would involve transplanting a living head onto a recently deceased body. The procedure will cost 11 million US dollars.  150 doctors and nurses present will be present, and it's estimated to take around thirty-six hours to complete. The two doctors and critics agree that the most difficult part of the procedure will be fusing the spinal cords. So Zou Yue, it sure looks like mad science is becoming reality.

Q2. The advancement of medical technologies hasn't come without controversies. Tell us some of them.

A1. Absolutely. The head transplant has already sparked sharp criticism as you can imagine. Ethical question number one is that the head transplant patient might die. And then if the transplant is a success, who’s the survivor? The head or the body? Not to mention where the donor’s body would come from, as Chinese do not have the tradition of donating their body to science.  But Dr. Ren says he expected the shockwaves, just like when people first heard about heart transplants or hand transplants.

What’s more, the application of robotic surgery has been particularly controversial, despite increasing demand and surging popularity. Critics point out for certain types of surgeries, robotic surgery has not been proved to be better, with higher complication rate and higher costs; and that the patients are misled by the marketing campaign of robotic manufacturers. //And many might ask: will robots replace human doctors one day?

Some experts say not in the near future, or 10-20 years, but in the distant future, or 50 plus years, very likely. For now the robots still need to be supervised by humans.  They are not autonomous, self-thinking being in most cases, but some of them are already being programmed to do surgical tasks autonomously. So it’s totally possible that in the future, machines would be in charge. Their decisions would be based on algorithms and big data.