Tonya Kaltenbach, MD

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 guideline development for the endoscopic removal of colorectal lesions. She served on the National Comprehensive Cancer Network (NCCN) Colorectal Cancer Screening Panel, and on the American College of Gastroenterology Educational Affairs Committee. Dr. Kaltenbach is a leading faculty speaker and regularly presents at national and international conferences and events related to gastrointestinal endoscopy. She has a focus in teaching pedagogy and has directed hands-on and virtual training events for endoscopy fellows around the world. Her special areas of expertise include optical diagnosis of gastrointestinal lesions, endoscopic management of patients with inflammatory bowel disease, and advanced endoscopic resection.

Dr. Kaltenbach’s research interests primarily focus on improving the quality of colon cancer screenings through endoscopic imaging, advanced endoscopic therapies, novel training methods, and the development of evidence-based clinical practice guidelines. She is currently 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 a key opinion leader on the advisory board for ai4gi to develop deep-learning technology for real-time detection and diagnosis of colorectal polyps and is a leading expert in optical diagnosis. She has previously led a multicenter clinical trial that demonstrated the effectiveness and accuracy of the endoscopic optical diagnosis of diminutive colorectal polyps thereby reducing the future need for histopathology follow-up.

In addition, Dr. Kaltenbach is the Principal Investigator (PI) for the COMPLETE study, a multicenter trial to assess the role of video-based feedback in improving endoscopy trainee competency in polypectomy. In an effort to further enhance the quality of endoscopy education, she has developed and facilitated several simulation-based mastery learning curricula for basic and advanced endoscopic therapies. These curricula have been adopted across several training institutions in the United States and Asia. Moreover, she played a leading role in the international efforts to enhance the colonoscopy quality for the surveillance and management of dysplasia in inflammatory bowel disease patients and the subsequent SCENIC guideline (Surveillance for Colorectal Endoscopic Neoplasia Detection and Management in Inflammatory Bowel Disease Patients: International Consensus Recommendations). Through her current and previous work, she has made crucial contributions to enhancing the role of endoscopic resection for complex polyps and elucidating the epidemiology of nonpolypoid colorectal neoplasms.