On Wednesday, doctors at the Da Nang General Hospital with the help of Professor Masatoshi Makuuchi, a living legend in the surgical field in the world, succeeded for the first time in conducting a surgery to remove a liver tumour from a 78-year-old man.

The surgery in progress

The senior patient from Quang Ngai Province was reportedly suffering from rib cage pain.

The doctors detected the tumour reaching 7cm in diameter in the patient's right liver.

After a medical consultancy, professor Makuuchi decided to directly perform a operation to remove the tumour. The surgeons are from the hospital’s wards of Digestive Surgery, Anesthesiology and Resuscitation.

After undergoing five-hour-long surgery, the patient's health is now recovering.

Dr Nguyen Hoang, Director of the Digestive Surgery Ward, said “While performing the surgery, professor Makuuchi instructed our doctors how to locate the blood vessels in order to help them initiatively stop bleeding which is one of possible risks of complications occurring during surgery”.

The surgery is part of a cooperative programme between the Da Nang General Hospital, the Vietnamese and Japanese Doctors’ Association, and the Team Medical Rounds organisation in Japan.

Participating in the surgery give a chance for local doctors to learn valuable experience from Professor Masatoshi Makuuchi

In September, the Da Nang General Hospital and the Vietnamese and Japanese Doctors’ Association together entered into a cooperative agreement on training professional doctors for liver transplants.

Accordingly, with the help of the Team Medical Rounds organisation along with the Association, the Da Nang hospital will send its doctors involving in organ transplantation service to Japan to attend professional training courses.

Da Nang’s doctors will study and work at hospitals and medical institutes in Japan within 6 months. In addition, Japanese doctors will visit and perform from simple to complicated case of removing liver tumours at the Da Nang hospital, and transfer liver transplant techniques to local doctors.

The intention of the cooperative agreement between Da Nang and Japan is to help the city’s hospital realise its goal of performing its first liver transplant by 2020, and establishing the Organ and Stem Cell Transplantation Centre in the future.