Pictures posted online showed the vast, gray, disk-shaped structure nestled among the lush trees and karst cliffs of Guizhou, one of China’s poorest provinces.

A small tube is placed in the patient’s stomach via an endoscope and connected to a disk-shaped port implanted in the patient’s side.

In recent years, infrared observations have revealed a number of likely preplanetary disk-shaped clouds of gas and dust around some of the nearby stars.