A cardiologist in Saint-Denis, France, guided a robotic arm through a narrow, curved artery from behind a lead shield, never touching the patient directly and never absorbing a dose of radiation at the table. The procedure was one of 20 first-in-human cases testing Stereotaxis' next-generation robotic system, built on technology from its subsidiary Robocath, and the company says every case met the study's clinical success criteria.
Stereotaxis presented the results on November 1, 2026, during a session on robotics in transcatheter heart interventions at the Transcatheter Cardiovascular Therapeutics conference in San Diego, according to Stereotaxis. The pilot study, conducted at Centre Cardiologique du Nord with principal investigators Dr. Mohammed Nejjari and Dr. Franck Digne, logged a 100% clinical success rate and a 95% technical success rate across all 20 percutaneous coronary interventions, with no device-related adverse events.
Why the lesion mix matters
The study deliberately included lesions across three difficulty tiers: A/B1, B2 and C-type. C-type lesions, often found in tortuous or heavily calcified distal vessels, are typically the cases operators handle manually because robotic catheter systems have struggled historically with the dexterity those vessels demand. Stereotaxis says its new system can advance and control up to five interventional devices simultaneously, a capability aimed squarely at that complex end of the caseload rather than only the easiest lesions vendors often use to pad early trial data.
Robotic PCI has existed commercially for more than a decade through systems like Corindus (acquired by Siemens Healthineers), but adoption has stayed niche, limited mostly to high-volume academic centers. Stereotaxis built its name in magnetic cardiac ablation navigation before acquiring Robocath, a French robotics company, to extend into coronary intervention; the deal reportedly carried a value of up to $45 million in milestone payments.
What changes next for hospitals
Radiation exposure is the recurring argument for robotic PCI: interventional cardiologists accumulate occupational radiation doses over a career that have been linked to elevated risks of cataracts and orthopedic injuries from wearing lead aprons for decades. A system that lets the physician operate from a shielded console removes that exposure entirely, which the study's authors flagged explicitly in reporting zero physician radiation dose across all 20 cases.
The next hurdle is scale. A 20-patient pilot at a single French center is far from the multi-site, randomized evidence regulators and hospital purchasing committees typically want before adopting a six- or seven-figure capital system. Stereotaxis said the study manuscript has been submitted for peer-reviewed publication, and the company's commercial case will depend on whether larger trials reproduce the 95% technical success rate in less specialized hospitals. Competing robotic-assist platforms from Corindus and smaller entrants will be watching the same data to benchmark their own complex-lesion performance.