News & Events: Parathyroid Surgery

Candidates for thyroid surgery often have concerns about the visible scarring that can result from standard open thyroidectomy. A relatively new technique of endoscopic transoral thyroidectomy pioneered at UCSF leaves little to no trace at the skin level of the major operation performed underneath. Endocrine surgeon Insoo Suh, MD, a surgical pioneer, presents this new approach with case studies from the UCSF Endocrine Surgery & Oncology clinic. Dr. Suh, an assistant professor in the UCSF Department of Surgery, specializes in diseases of the thyroid, parathyroid and adrenal glands.

A Thai physician developed the transoral thyroidectomy in 2014 and published an article about it in 2016; since then, the procedure has spread to a handful of medical centers in the United States. To learn how to perform the surgery, Lin reached out to Insoo Suh, MD, assistant professor of surgery at University of California-San Francisco, who has completed about 25 of the procedures. She observed Suh perform the surgery at UCSF, then practiced the technique on cadavers. When it came time for Torres' surgery, which took place April 16, Suh guided Lin through it. Robin Cisco, MD, an assistant [...]

Insoo Suh, M.D., is Assistant Professor of Surgery at UCSF and Co-Founder of Prescient Surgical. After completing a fellowship in endocrine surgery at UCSF, Dr. Suh particiated in the Stanford University Biodesign Innovation Fellowship program in 2011 before joining faculty at UCSF. We sat down with him to learn more about his journey as a physician-innovator. Tell me about a device you're working on and the problem you're trying to address. Laparoscopy and other minimally invasive techniques have revolutionized our field in so many ways, but there definitely still remains room for [...]

Insoo Suh, M.D., FACS, assistant professor of endocrine surgery and noted surgical innovator, presented his experiences using "scarless" transoral endoscopic thyroid and parathyroid surgery to a national audience at the 2018 meeting of the American Association of Endocrine Surgeons (AAES). Minimally invasive and remote access thyroid surgery has been evolving with the transoral endoscopic thyroidectomy vestibular approach (TOETVA) emerging as a true "scarless" thyroidectomy. Dr. Suh helped pioneer this technique and is among the first surgeons in the U.S. to utililze it.  Dr. Suh also [...]