Indira Gandhi Institute Medical Sciences (IGIMS) is likely to begin registration of liver transplant patients in November, and start surgeries in December.

If IGIMS starts liver transplants, it will become the first hospital - government or private - to do so in Bihar. It has already achieved the distinction of starting kidney transplants first among all hospitals in the state. After IGIMS, Ruban Memorial Hospital in Patliputra has also started kidney transplants.

An 11-member team of IGIMS doctors has recently returned after receiving training in liver transplant surgery at the Institute of Liver and Biliary Sciences (ILBS) in Delhi.

The team included medical superintendent Manish Mandal, liver transplant surgeon Rakesh Kumar Singh, hepatologist Ashish Jha, radiologist Rajiv Priyadarshi, pathologist Vijayanand, immunologist Abhay Kumar, and anaesthetists Kunal Singh, Shashank, and Dheeraj.

After Chhath, IGIMS is going to send another doctors' team to the Delhi hospital for the training.

'Liver transplant is even more complicated than kidney and heart transplant surgeries,' said Mandal. 'Kidney transplant surgeries hardly take four hours and heart transplant surgery six hours, but a liver transplant surgery lasts for 12-14 hours. The doctors' team keep on rotating during the surgery as it impossible for one team to carry such a long operation.

'In liver transplant surgery, both recipient and donor can die. The survival rate in liver transplant surgery is around 60 to 70 per cent. This is why liver transplant is done at very few hospitals in the country as doctors have to take a lot of precautions.'

Mandal said the hospital is right now buying specialised equipment needed for liver transplants.

While people have to cough up around Rs 20 lakh for liver transplant at facilities outside the state, at IGIMS it would cost between Rs 10 lakh and Rs 12 lakh.

'We have written to the state government to completely bear the cost of the surgery,' Mandal said.

'Let's see how much incentive is fixed by the government for this surgery. The state government is supposed to reimburse some amount of procedure cost of the surgery for below poverty line patients.'