The research of Henning Gaissert, MD, in the Division of Thoracic Surgery at Massachusetts General Hospital aims to change clinical practice for common and uncommon thoracic diseases to inform national and international audiences about them.
Based on a unique repository of airway disorders at Mass General.
This project was conducted by Lucia Madariaga, MD, former Mass General thoracic surgery fellow, and Monica Soni, a former medical student at Georgetown University, under the direction of Dr. Gaissert and his institutional experience with tracheal resection.
Dr. Gaissert guided Dr. Madariaga and Abraham Geller, a former student at Harvard Medical School, through a parenchyma-sparing lung resection to demonstrate its value in treating lung cancer as opposed to pneumonectomy.
In a multidisciplinary collaboration at Mass General, Dr. Madariaga has shown the early success of the Pulmonary Nodule Clinic toward improving diagnostic accuracy and minimizing unnecessary surgical procedures.
As chair of the thoracic subcommittee for Access and Publication in the Society of Thoracic Surgeons (STS), Dr. Gaissert oversees the selection of research proposals for the General Thoracic Surgery Database. The effect of this committee on research output is described in annual reports. Based on this experience, former Mass General surgical resident Brooks Udelsman, MD, and Dr. Madariaga initiated a database analysis of clinical staging accuracy, found participant-specific variations in staging accuracy and proposed a metric to improve quality among database participants.
This project aims to uncover how thoracic muscle measurements on standard preoperative imaging may predict operative risk. It was done in collaboration with Mass General thoracic radiologists—under the leadership of Florian Fintelmann, MD, and first author Till Best, a former medical student at Humboldt University—Washington University and the University of Chicago.
Born and raised in Hamburg, Germany, Henning Gaissert, MD, served his internship and residency in surgery at Massachusetts General Hospital and Barnes-Jewish Hospital, and his fellowship in thoracic surgery at Barnes-Jewish Hospital. He led the section of thoracic surgery at Brown University and Rhode Island Hospital for five years before returning to Mass General.
Dr. Gaissert is a fellow of the American College of Surgeons and the American College of Chest Physicians. His clinical interests are lung cancer, esophageal cancer, tracheal disease and surgical reconstruction of complex swallowing disorders.
