Dr. Tonya R Kaltenbach MD MAS

Dr. Tonya Kaltenbach is a Professor of Clinical Medicine at UC San Francisco (UCSF) and the director of Advanced Endoscopy at the San Francisco VA Medical Center. She has served on the US Multi-Society Task Force on Colorectal Cancer and led the recent recommendation document for the endoscopic removal of colorectal lesions. She served on the National Comprehensive Cancer Network (NCCN) Colorectal Cancer Screening Panel, and on the ACG Educational Affairs Committee. Dr. Kaltenbach is a leading faculty speaker and regularly presents at national and international conferences, including hands-on and virtual training. Her special areas of expertise include optical diagnosis of gastrointestinal lesions, nonpolypoid colorectal neoplasms, advanced endoscopic resection of gastrointestinal lesions and endoscopic management of patients with inflammatory bowel disease, in which she played a leading role in the international SCENIC guideline.

Dr. Kaltenbach's research interests primarily focus on colon cancer prevention through endoscopic imaging, advanced endoscopic therapies, novel training methods, and the development of evidence-based clinical practice guidelines. She is currently co-leading the development and implementation of a natural language processing (NLP) algorithm that standardizes the measurement and reporting of colonoscopy quality metrics across the national VA healthcare system. She is involved in the study of artificial intelligence technology for real-time detection and diagnosis of colorectal polyps. She has previously led a multicenter clinical trial that demonstrated the accuracy of the endoscopic optical diagnosis of diminutive colorectal polyps.

In addition, at this meeting, Dr. Kaltenbach and team will be presenting results from the COMPLETE study, a multicenter trial on the role of video-based feedback to accelearte competency in cold snare polypectomy, along with novel efforts using simulation-based mastery learning curricula for basic and advanced endoscopic therapies to enhance the quality of endoscopy education. These curricula have been adopted across several training institutions in the United States and Asia.