In 1997, Mantion, then on his first visit to Urumqi, performed the first anatomical liver resection surgery in Northwest China, which later drastically improved surgical techniques and management of hepatic AE as well as other hepato-pancreatic-biliary, or HPB cancers, at the First Affiliated Hospital of Xinjiang Medical University.

Before that, surgical resection in Northwest China was not so anatomic and precise.

Since his first visit, Mantion has kept returning to China every year.

Within three years of his first visit, the hospital's team of doctors that focuses on organ transplantation was built up, and Mantion's student Wen Hao, current director of the hospital, pioneered China's first successful liver transplantation for an endstaged AE patient in 2000, giving the patient a new lease of life.

Meanwhile, Mantion helps promote exchange programs that allow HPB surgeons, anesthetists, nephrologists and other specialists in organ transplantation from Xinjiang to visit his transplantation center in France.

The annual group training programs, which started in 2004 and are sponsored by the State Administration of Foreign Experts Affairs in China, are of great help to the hospital team.

"With their help, our international visibility has improved," Wen says.

In 2016, WHO set up in Xinjiang its first Collaborating Center for Prevention and Care Management of Echinococcosis in Asia, which aims at providing methodological support and expert advice, especially for the Central Asian area.

But, the academic link between Mantion and Xinjiang was bridged years earlier. In 1986, the medical center at University of Franche-Comte, Besancon, France - the hospital Mantion works for - launched the world's first liver transplantation for AE patients.