Thomas S. Lendvay

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

He has spearheaded the robotics program at Seattle Children's, where he is Co-Director of the Robotics program, and collaborates with the University of Washington Biorobotics Engineering Department on clinical applications of new telerobotic technologies. He serves as an Adjunct Professor in the Department of Electrical Engineering. Through his work with the Biorobotics Lab, he was one of two land-based surgeons involved in a NASA Extreme Environment Mission Operations (NEEMO) demonstration of remote telerobotic surgery that was performed from Seattle to a submerged space station off the coast of Florida.

Dr. Lendvay is a contributing member of the WWAMI Institute of Simulation in Healthcare (WISH) which helps advance surgical education for medical students and residents through a simulation curriculum and is Director of the Urology Departments' year-round residency technical skills training program within WISH. 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. 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 anonymously distributed crowds of non-medically trained people to assess the technique of surgeons just as expert surgeons would. This technology led to a University of Washington spin-out company CSATS, Inc. that provides this service to hospitals interested in quality improvement feedback for their providers. Dr. Lendvay co-founded this UW spin-out company and served as the Chief Medical Officer from 2014-to 2018 until it was acquired by Johnson and Johnson. In 2018, Dr. Lendvay was awarded the University of Washington Medical School Inventor of the Year Award for this technology. All these initiatives have been directed towards the goal of reducing surgical errors and raising the level of surgeon skill towards Excellence for optimal patient care.