"Legend of organ transplants" performs first tumor removal surgery on Vietnamese patient

• Vietnam performs transnational organ transplant miracles
• 18 hospitals of Vietnam qualified for organ transplantation
• Vietnam successfully marks 1,400 organ transplants

With the support of Professor Masatoshi Makuuchi, a living legend in the surgical field in the world, the team of the Da Nang General Hospital successfully removed a liver tumor  reaching 7cm in diameter in the patient's right liver of a 78-year-old man from Quang Ngai.

Currently, after over five hours of 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”.

Earlier, the senior patient from Quang Ngai was reportedly suffering from rib cage pain. After a medical consultancy, Professor Makuuchi decided to directly perform an operation to remove the tumor. The surgeons are from the hospital’s wards of Digestive Surgery, Anesthesiology and Resuscitation.

Dr. Masatoshi Makuuchi is president of the Japanese Red Cross Medical Center, president of the International Association of Surgeons, Gastroenterologists and Oncologists (IASGO) and honorary professor of the University of Tokyo.

As a pioneer and a recognized international expert in the field of HBP surgery, Dr. Makuuchi throughout his career, has taken initiatives in developing methods of perioperative managements such as ultrasound guided PTC, BTBD, GB drainage, PVE, intermittent hemi hepatic inflow occlusion, warm ischemia in living donor and surgical techniques such as subsegmentectomy, and inferior hepatic vein preserving hepatectomies, contributing to establishing techniques for safe surgical operation.

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 organization 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 tumors 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 realize its goal of performing its first liver transplant by 2020, and establishing the Organ and Stem Cell Transplantation Centre in the future.