Surgeons perform endoscopy for living-donor liver transplantation
Chief surgeon of the transplant Dr. Le Van Thanh, Head of the hospital’s Department of Liver - Gallbladder - Pancreatic Surgery, said that after five hours, surgeons have performed laparoscopic surgery to take a piece of living donor’s right liver for transplantation. This complicated surgical technique must be carried out by experienced surgeons.
Currently, there are only a few hepatobiliary and liver transplant centers in developed countries such as the US, Europe, Japan, and Korea that can perform laparoscopic surgery to remove liver transplants from living donors for the transplantation.
Dr. Le Van Thanh also said that laparoscopic surgery has the advantages of less pain, less cutting of skin and tissue, fewer wound complications, quicker post-operative recovery, and a shorter duration of hospital stay.
Especially, six days after undergoing the laparoscopic surgery, living donors can be discharged from medical infirmaries in good health, with normal liver function while recipients’ transplanted liver function will work well after 10 days. Moreover, they can walk around without assistance.
The first successful application of laparoscopic surgery to remove liver grafts from living donors is a new step in the field of liver transplantation in the Southeast Asian country, contributing to improving Vietnam’s organ transplant expertise, opening up the prospect of saving lives of critically ill patients.
According to the health sector’s report, approximately 2,000-2,500 Vietnamese people with terminal liver cancer need a liver transplant. The Military Central Hospital 108 started performing liver transplants in 2017 and it has performed 91 living-donor liver transplants.
