Oliver Zivanovic MD, PhD

Oliver is a gynecologic oncology surgeon with ten years of experience in caring for women with ovarian cancer, uterine cancer, cervical cancer, and vulvar cancer. He perform about 250 procedures each year using a variety of techniques, including minimally invasive approaches. At Memorial Sloan Kettering, they are able to combine our experience and expertise both in and out of the operating room — working closely with our colleagues in pathology, medical oncology, and radiation oncology — to provide better outcomes than ever for women with gynecologic diseases.
He come from a family of doctors, so he naturally developed an interest in medicine. After completing his fellowship at MSK, there was no question that he would devote his professional life to helping people with cancer. He decided to focus his clinical practice on gynecologic diseases because they can be complex surgical cases requiring a great amount of skill and focus to treat successfully.
In the operating room, he have particular expertise in performing cytoreductive surgery for women with advanced ovarian cancer. The goal of this procedure is to remove as much visible disease as possible, making the tumor more responsive to chemotherapy and improving the chances of successful treatment. In addition, he have extensive experience in surgically treating uterine cancer. When appropriate, he use minimally invasive techniques (laparoscopy and robotics) to reduce recovery time so that patients can get back to their lives sooner. He also skilled at performing risk-reducing surgery for women who have breast cancer, ovarian cancer, and endometrial cancer in their families and who may have a higher chance of developing these diseases.
The main focus of his research has been to establish and evaluate how we can use hyperthermic intraperitoneal chemoperfusion (HIPEC) to improve outcomes for women with advanced ovarian cancer. HIPEC delivers heated chemotherapy into the abdominal cavity, where it attacks the diseased tissue directly. He also involved in patient-centered research, in which we ask patients to evaluate how they are doing and provide suggestions on what they can do improve the treatment experience. The goal of this research is to make communication between physicians and patients after surgery easier, and ultimately help patients recover faster.