Dr Nara's Thoracic Surgery

02/11/2025

In this day and age of AI and precision medicine, surgery should not be performed without in depth understanding of the individual patients anatomy. With the chance of bronchovascular variations as high as 20 to 30%, mistakes must be avoided at all costs.

This is an example on how to utilise AI and 3d reconstruction to study that patient's anatomy before a right upper lobectomy for lung adenocarcinoma.

The approach can be by VATS, RATS or even open thoracotomy, but do not make mistakes due to suboptimal planning and understanding.

26/10/2025

Congratulations to Dr YenZhir Tay for being selected as one of the winners of digital paper presentation at the SEATS 2025 in Bali. He wrote on CEA correlation with lung cancer and egfr mutation. Well done.

25/10/2025

South East Asia Thoracic Society Conference 2025 in Bali was mindblowing in all aspects. Huge congratulations to the organising chair, Dr Saladin for pulling off a memorable event. The collaboration between surgeons, oncologists and pulmonologists were evidently strong in the conference proceedings addressing various thoracic diseases.

The HKL team presented 3 posters, presenting complex procedures performed. Well done.

Thank you for the invite and see you all in Singapore next year.

18/10/2025

Day trip to my alma mater, Hospital Sultanah Bahiyah Alor Setar for the Lung Cancer Updates 2025. Nostalgic feeling standing on the stage giving a talk as Consultant Thoracic Surgeon, the same place I used to run around as a medical officer around 18 years ago. Time flies.

Thank you Dr Arvind Alaga for the invite. Looking forward for our future collaboration. Proud of your achievements up north.

14/10/2025

Sounds like a cartel business this insurance, at the cost of patients, squeezing the doctors.

11/10/2025

The 7th Indian Society of Thoracic Surgeons Conference 2025 was held in Jodhpur, the Blue City. The academic diet were well curated for the new and senior surgeons. I was tasked to deliver 3 talks on
1. Training opportunities in SEA
2. NiVATS
3. Chest Wall Tumor - Beyond the Borders of Chest.

To spice up the event, the banquet dinner was entertained by the famous Mame Khan (just found out he is famous). Mesmerising voice, and apparently he was the first ever Folk artist to walk the Red Carpet at The Cannes Film Festival in 2022 and to perform at the Indian pavilion at Cannes.

Made new friends and rekindled camaraderie with the old ones.

Kudos to Dr Ramkaran and his vibrant team for making this conference a huge success and a new benchmark. I am truly honoured to be part of faculty. Thank you for the invite.

03/10/2025

I think i am going to go

03/10/2025

Lady in her 60s presented with a "long overdue" left breast phyllodes tumor, invading the chest wall involving 4th to 6th rib and lower sternum.

The thoracic and breast teams resected the tumor and fixed the titanium plates. Plastic & Reconstruction team performed the anterolateral thigh free flap cover. Patient is recovering well, liberated from the agony.

28/09/2025

75 year old lady, previous PTB infection with right main bronchial stenosis, collapsed in emergency and was intubated. Unfortunately, due to diseased airway, the post wall of trachea was torn due to the intubation.

She was sent to our centre for surgical intervention, but we decided otherwise.

It is important for Thoracic Surgeons to be versatile in both surgical and endoscopic interventions to be able to decide on table on the best solution for the patient without much fuss.

26/09/2025

This week, 8 patients were operated. Among the interesting ones were an 81 year old man with lung cancer who underwent vats lobectomy. Followed by a young girl with distal tracheal stenosis underwent NiVATS tracheal resection and reconstruction.

And then, went on guiding my fellows in performing right S6 segmentectomy with ICG guidance. And watched Dr Benedict operate on a lady with left pneumothorax and mediastinal mass and underlying myasthenia gravis.

Now we are awaiting for a patient with tracheal injury from a neighbouring hospital.

Have a good weekend everyone.

26/09/2025

Another appreciation from an 81 year old patient. Age is just a number....

23/09/2025

This comes with no surprise, but what surprises many were the reasons why those minority in every subspecialty chose to stay? Pay is a meagre fraction of the potential earnings in private, many regulations to even go overseas as government servants, very limited time for private practise with many paperwork to fill etc. Despite all these issues, we chose to stay because we want to serve the public of Malaysia who got no options to seek the expensive private healthcare, simple as that. And we always HOPE God will take care of everything else. Hopefully (and that's a very big HOPE as well) the administrators up there dont take this deed for granted for too long. The Malaysian people will be getting the brunt of it.

Across 8 surgical specialties, only a small minority of NSR-registered surgeons are practising in the Health Ministry. Except for trauma, with all 9 surgeons are in MOH, other surgical fields see proportions of 33% or less in the government health service.
https://codeblue.galencentre.org/2025/09/most-surgeons-in-malaysia-practising-outside-health-ministry/