Thomas Lendvay, MD

Thomas S. Lendvay, MD, is Attending Pediatric Urologist and Program Director for the Pediatric Urology Fellowship at Seattle Children’s Hospital. He is also a professor in the Urology department at the University of Washington (UW). His clinical and research focus is on minimally invasive surgery using laparoscopy and telerobotic surgical technologies.

Through his pioneering research in methods to objectively assess the technical skills of surgeons, Dr. Lendvay co-invented Crowd-Sourced Assessment of Technical Skills (CSATS), which leverages anonymous distributed crowds of non-medically trained people to assess surgeons’ technique just as expert surgeons would. He later co-founded a UW spin-out company, CSATS, Inc., to provide hospitals with quality improvement feedback for providers. Dr. Lendvay served as the Chief Medical Officer from 2014 to 2018 until it was acquired by Johnson & Johnson. He was honored with the UW Medical School Inventor of the Year Award in 2018 for the creation of this technology.

All these initiatives support the goal of optimal patient care by reducing surgical errors and elevating surgeons’ skills.

Dr. Lendvay is a contributing member—and Director of the Urology Department’s year-round residency technical skills training program—of the WWAMI Institute of Simulation in Healthcare (WISH) that advances surgical education for medical students and residents through simulation curriculum. He has been, and is currently, the Principal Investigator for extramurally funded Department of Defense grants testing the role that surgical warm-up using virtual reality simulators has on the technical performance of surgeons.

He spearheaded and co-directs the robotics program at Seattle Children’s. He collaborates with the UW Biorobotics Engineering Department on clinical applications of new telerobotic technologies and serves as Adjunct Professor in the Electrical Engineering Department. Through his work with the Biorobotics Lab, Dr. Lendvay was one of two land-based surgeons involved in a NASA Extreme Environment Mission Operations (NEEMO) demo of remote telerobotic surgery—performed from Seattle, Washington, to a submerged space station off the coast of Florida.

Dr. Lendvay was also an originator and a leading contributor in a WHO DeMaND study on the use of Methylene Blue as a low-cost safe decontamination method to enable medical mask and N95 / FPP2 respirators reuse in low resource and other healthcare settings where there are critical shortages.