TORONTO — A team at St. Michael's Hospital in Toronto has successfully completed 10 brain angiograms using a robot controlled remotely by a neurosurgeon, paving the way to eventually providing critical stroke care to patients in northern Ontario.

A brain angiogram is a minimally invasive diagnostic procedure where doctors place a catheter in the femoral artery through the groin and thread it up to the brain, then inject contrast dye that allows the medical team to see any problems in the blood vessels with an X-ray.

Normally, the doctor is beside the patient manually moving the catheter. But in what the hospital says is a world first, the team performed a series of angiograms where Dr. Vitor Mendes Pereira, head of St. Michael's neurovascular program, used a computer to remotely control

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