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At first glance it looks a bit like a video game, albeit a very gory one.

But beaming the inside of a patient’s body onto a giant TV screen is just one of the latest techniques being pioneered at Maidstone Hospital.

On Friday the Maidstone and Tunbridge Wells NHS Trust unveiled its new laparascopic theatre at Maidstone Hospital.

Later in the year the hospital will become the first in the UK to broadcast innovative laparascopic procedures by video link to surgeons across the world and the trust will become an international teaching and training centre for the techniques.

Laparascopy is a procedure where doctors look inside the abdomen by making a small incision in the abdominal wall.

A laparascope - a thin, bendy microscope with a light on the end - is then passed through looking at abdominal organs tissue and it can also be used for small operations, called keyhole surgery.

The images picked up by the laparascope are displayed on a television monitor so the surgeon can see what is happening in real time. Having an operation by keyhole surgery means a patient does not have to be cut open.

Building work is due to begin next week on the training centre.

To mark the developments, the trust invited the Kent Messenger to watch a keyhole operation to cure a hiatus hernia. Laparoscopic surgery can also be used in bowel cancer, urology and some gynaecological cancer cases.

Amir Nisar, consultant upper GI surgeon and laparoscopic, said: "Laparascopic surgery has many benefits for patients such as less post-operative pain and a quicker recovery time.

"As a surgeon carrying out the procedure you do have to disassociate yourself with what is happening in front of you and focus on what is happening with the screen."