Liver Surgeon Professor Cheung Tan-To Pursues ‘Rebellious’ Innovation
Surgeon Professor Cheung Tan-To is poised to accelerate his research and improve patient outcomes thanks to the support of the Anthony and Anne Cheung Professorship in Innovative and Minimally Invasive Surgery.
Endowed Professorships are one of the most significant awards given to leading academics at the University of Hong Kong. These Professorships are named in honour of a donor or a corporation or other honoree recommended by the donor. Since their establishment in 2005, 120 Endowed Professorships have been awarded to scholars.
In celebration of the Medical Faculty’s newly appointed Endowed Professors, we sat down with these academics to discover more about their careers and their research goals.
Professor Cheung, who is also Co-Chief of the Divisions of Hepatobiliary & Pancreatic Surgery and Liver Transplantation in the Department of Surgery, expressed his gratitude to donors Mr Anthony and Mrs Anne Cheung.
“I’m very grateful for their generous support and their trust to place me as a recipient of this endowed professorship,” Professor Cheung said. “They are fostering change, academic exchange and improving patient outcomes under the innovative and minimally invasive approach. I won’t let them down and will focus greatly on this research.”
Professor Cheung said the additional funding from the endowment will allow him to employ extra talent and buy equipment to boost his research into minimally invasive surgical approaches for hepatobiliary cancers. Hepatobiliary cancers include cancer of the liver, bile ducts and gallbladder.
The surgeon expects this resource boost will accelerate his team’s work by at least 30%.
“We’ll be able to recruit patients more efficiently, and we can have research outcomes much earlier,” he said. “And…we’ll have extra manpower to make sure all of our innovative treatments are up to par and within safety range.”
A graduate of HKUMed’s Bachelor of Medicine and Bachelor of Surgery in 1999, Professor Cheung specialised in surgery after a “very happy” internship in the Department of Surgery.
He fought off keen competition to become a surgical trainee, joining the hepatobiliary and liver transplant team at Queen Mary Hospital.
Describing an intense period where he barely left the hospital, Professor Cheung said his early years on the team were both bitter and sweet.
“At that time, my mentors, Professor Fan Sheung Tat and Professor Lo Chung-Mau were the leaders in HBT and liver transplant surgery in the world,” he said. “I was very lucky to have them as mentors and to join the force.”
In the early 2000s, this expert team had reduced the hospital mortality rate for these major surgeries to zero, compared to the global benchmark of 10%, setting high standards for the trainee surgeon.
Seeking out a new challenge, he saw the opportunity to bring minimally invasive surgery to Hong Kong. But it was not a simple task.
“Any new innovation at that time was considered as rebellious and would be scrutinised under the microscope,” the surgeon said.
He persevered despite warnings that if the surgical technique did not achieve equally good results as open surgery that the programme would be pulled.
Professor Cheung travelled to Japan, France and South Korea to learn from leading surgeons in the field and to bring back techniques and equipment to Hong Kong.
Often known as keyhole surgery, these minimally invasive surgeries insert a camera and instruments through small incisions in the abdomen. Professor Cheung explained that these surgeries result in reduced blood loss, fewer lung complications and less pain for patients.
He performed his first keyhole surgery in Hong Kong, a liver resection, in 2006.
“That [period] was a painful experience and like walking on thin ice,” he said. “If any of the surgeries went wrong, they would terminate my programme.”
It took dozens more patients, careful analysis of results, multiple academic papers and another 10 years before the technique was fully accepted by his mentors.
“So far, we don’t have a single mortality because we are in the same shoes as giants,” he said. “They set very high standards, we kept them and we are the successor doing good surgery with a new approach.”
Today, more than half of the hepatobiliary surgeries performed at Queen Mary Hospital are minimally invasive surgeries, he said proudly.
Since his first interest in minimally invasive surgeries, Professor Cheung has continued to seek out and adopt new technologies.
He now regularly conducts robotic surgery to remove liver tumours and for complex pancreatic cancer cases. Today, Queen Mary Hospital is one of the highest volume centres in Hong Kong for robotic pancreatic surgery.
Additionally, he has written ten papers on the use of high-intensity focused ultrasound to burn a liver tumour without any incisions, a technique he pioneered in Hong Kong.
More than 20 years on from his first surgeries, the surgeon still holds himself to his mentors’ meticulous standards. After long days in the operating theatre, he watches recordings of his surgeries to hunt out redundant movements and any inefficiencies.
“I hope that I can improve every day so that the surgery becomes more efficient, safer and with better outcomes,” he said.
