Erkan Yildirim MD, PhD, FETCS

Dr. Erkan Yildirim is a leading Thoracic Surgeon with over 25 years of experience in the field. He is a Thoracic Surgeon at Thoracic and Lung Transplantation Surgery, Bellaten Health Ltd Co., Istanbul, Turkey. Dr. Yildirim's area of expertise includes surgery for lung cancer, esophageal cancer, chest wall tumors, and mediastinal tumors. He performs MIS (Uniportal VATS) procedures, bronchoscopy, esophagoscopy, and mediastinoscopy. He also performs minimal invasive pectus surgeries for pectus excavatum, pectus carinatum (Nuss & Abramson's procedures), and pectus arcuate. Dr. Yildirim graduated from the School of Medicine, Anadolu University in 1992. He completed his term as a medical practitioner in Denizli, Turkey, in 1993. He achieved a surgical fellowship in the lung transplantation program in Toronto, Canada, headed by Prof. Shaf Keshavjee, in 2012. He was involved in 89 recipient procedures (as the first surgeon in 49 cases) and almost 60 retrieval procedures, including both dbd and dcd donors.

Dr. Yildirim started working as a surgeon in the Thoracic Surgery Clinic of Ankara Numune Teaching and Research Hospital in 2000. He became Chief Resident in the same hospital in 2001. He worked as an observer thoracic surgeon at Zurich University (Switzerland) in 2002, Toronto University (Canada) in 2004, Leuven University (Belgium) in 2008, and Kyoto University (Japan) in November 2012. Dr. Yildirim successfully completed the examination for European Board Certification for Thoracic Surgery (EBTCS), which was performed at the 10th Congress of the European Society for Thoracic Surgeons in 2002, and became a Fellow of the European Board of Thoracic and Cardiovascular Surgeons (FETCS).

Dr. Yildirim is the author of the first international clinical study on “Lung Transplant” in Turkey, which was published in 2009 (“Methods of Lung transplantation and lung volume reducing surgeries”. Dr. Yildirim has been working as a study referee for THKDC-Turkish Thoracic and Cardiovascular Surgery- Journal and EJCTS- European Journal of Cardiothoracic Surgery since 2002. Dr. Yildirim has been actively conducting four patent research. He has two formerly accepted patents related to pectus bars. Another license related to smart fluid catheters and a programmable box is to be approved. Dr. Yildirim participated and performed presentations in dozens of congresses, including 32 international congresses and 19 local congresses.