Dr. Kumar Palaniappan — Clinical Lead – Laparoscopy Liver Surgery in Chennai

Dr. Kumar Palaniappan is Clinical Lead for Laparoscopy Liver Surgery at Rela Hospital in Chennai, with more than 20 years of experience. His profile records surgical gastroenterology together with gastroenterology and hepatobiliary medicine.

Transplantation runs through his list. He performs liver transplant, pancreas transplant and simultaneous pancreas-kidney transplant, alongside liver tumor surgery, the Whipple procedure, pancreatectomy and gastrectomy.

His training is dated and moves from Bangalore through Madurai to Gurgaon. He read MBBS at Kempegowda Institute of Medical Sciences in Bangalore in 1999, took the DNB in general surgery in 2004 and the DNB in surgical gastroenterology in 2009, both at Meenakshi Mission Hospital and Research Centre in Madurai, and a fellowship in liver transplantation and HPB surgery at Medanta in Gurgaon in 2012.

Three further placements are all in minimally invasive technique, and they explain the laparoscopic half of his job title. He took robotic HPB surgery training at the Vattikutti Institute of Robotic Surgery, advanced training in HPB and liver transplant surgery at Asan Medical Center in Seoul, and laparoscopic liver surgery training at Iwate Medical University in Japan.

His conference record is heavily Japanese. He won a best paper award and travel grant at the Japanese HPB Society consensus conference on laparoscopic liver resection in Morioka in 2014, and again at the 27th meeting of the same society in Tokyo in June 2015, along with a best paper award at the IASGO conference in Tokyo that month. He also holds a best video award from IHPBA 2012 in Mumbai for auxiliary partial liver transplantation for propionic acidemia, and a best poster award from IHPBA in Ahmedabad in 2016.