Diego Gonzalez-rivas MD, FECTS

Dr. Diego Gonzalez-Rivas is a graduate of Santiago de Compostela University and the College of Physicians and Surgeons of Coruna University (MD). He received training in General Surgery, Thoracic Surgery, and lung transplantation at Coruna University Hospital. After completing a year working at Santiago University Hospital joined the faculty at Coruna Hospital and is currently a Thoracic Surgeon at Coruna University center and an active member of the lung transplantation program (40−45 cases per year). He is the creator of the Minimally Invasive Thoracic Surgery Unit (UCTMI) working at Quiron Hospital, San Rafael, and Modelo medical center. Actually, he works in these four medical hospitals at Coruna city and Shanghai Pulmonary Hospital, Shanghai, China. He is the director of the uniportal VATS training program at Shanghai Pulmonary Hospital (the biggest thoracic center in the world).

Dr. Gonzalez-Rivas serves on several editorial boards and is a reviewer of many scientific journals. He is the Associate Editor of the Journal of Visualized Surgery (JOVS), initiating the featured column “Teaching Uniportal VATS worldwide”. He is also the Editor of the book Uniportal Video-Assisted Thoracic Surgery and Video-Assisted Thoracic Surgery and Associate Editor of Tubeless Video-Assisted Thoracic Surgery.

He is the organizer of the annual meeting of the Spanish Society Of Thoracic Surgery (SECT) from 2014–2017. He also collaborates with the Educational Activities of the European Society of thoracic surgeons (ESTS), the International Society of Minimally Invasive Cardiothoracic Surgery (ISMICS), and the European Association of Cardiothoracic Surgery (EACTS). He was recently elected member of the American Association of Thoracic Surgery (AATS) He is a board European certificated surgeon since 2010 (FECTS). He started to perform VATS lobectomies in 2007 after learning the technique at Cedars Sinai. After 100 major resections were performed he visited Duke medical center to learn the double port technique with Dr. Thomas D’Amico. Once the experience was gained with this technique he evolved to a single-port approach.

He was a pioneer surgeon in the world performing uniportal VATS lobectomies (first case in June 2010) and non-intubated uniportal major pulmonary resections (first case in April 2014). He has published several papers describing these procedures and the results in the most important medical journals and textbooks of thoracic surgery.