Chester Koh, M.D.

My clinical area of expertise and interest is in minimally invasive surgery in children for their pediatric urologic conditions, especially with robotic surgery and single incision laparoscopic surgery, and I am the director of the Pediatric Robotic Surgery Program. We have shown that minimally invasive surgery in children has been associated with smaller incisions, shorter hospital stays, and decreased pain medication usage in comparison to open surgery in the field of pediatric urology for procedures such as pyeloplasty for ureteropelvic junction (UPJ) obstruction, nephrectomy (kidney removal), and ureteral reimplantation for vesicoureteral reflux. This often leads to faster recoveries for children, and allows their parents to minimize their time away from work. Robotic surgery can also be used for select genitourinary reconstructive procedures in pediatric urology as well. Our program serves as a pediatric robotic surgery research and training centerthat collaborates with the other institutions here in the Texas Medical Center. 

I collaborate with our Pediatric Urology Laboratory, which is supported in part by NIH funding, as my NIH-funded laboratory in the past investigated novel therapeutic pathways for bladder regeneration / inflammation and other non-cancer urologic conditions.

I also serve as the co-founder and co-PI of a FDA-supported pediatric medical device consortium (the Southern California Consortium for Technology and Innovation in Pediatrics (CTIP)), a pediatric medical device consortium that is based in Los Angeles and which includes Texas Children's Hospital and Baylor College of Medicine, as well as the founder of the Texas Children’s Hospital / Baylor College of Medicine-based consortium, the Southwest Pediatric Device Consortium (swpdc.org). These consortia are dedicated to improving children's health by supporting the development of innovative pediatric medical devices through all of the necessary stages - concept formation, prototyping, preclinical, clinical, manufacturing, marketing, and commercialization. The need for these consortia arose from the slow pace of pediatric medical device development, which currently lags behind the development of adult devices by five to ten years. In addition, children differ from adults in terms of their size, growth, development, body chemistry, and disease propensity.