Restoring Sleep Airway Health as a Gateway to Wellness
Stanley Yung Liu, MD, DDS

Sleep surgery really should be about restoring missed milestones during airway growth and development, followed by re-training of nasal breathing and pharyngeal dilator muscle strength.

3 learning objectives:

1. To understand the role and impact of nasal breathing during wakefulness and sleep.
2. To become familiar with the updated Stanford sleep surgery approach, which functions on a continuum of care with focus on patient-centered choices and outcome.
3. To be informed of the latest research on upper airway physiology, with a focus on projects involving machine learning/artificial intelligence.

Stanley Liu, MD, DDS, is an Associate Professor of Otolaryngology, and by courtesy, of Plastic and Reconstructive Surgery at Stanford University School of Medicine. He directs the Stanford Sleep Surgery Fellowship and is also a Stanford Biodesign faculty fellow.

After graduating from Stanford University with a degree in Biology, he received medical and dental degrees from the University of California-San Francisco, during which he was a Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI) Research Scholar. After oral and maxillofacial surgery residency at UCSF, he completed his sleep surgery fellowship in 2014 with the Department of Otolaryngology and sleep surgery pioneer Dr. Robert Riley at Stanford University.

He now practices and teaches the full scope of sleep apnea surgery including nasal, palate, tongue base, hypoglossal nerve stimulation, genioglossus advancement, and maxillomandibular advancement (MMA) procedures. He introduced adult maxillary expansion (DOME) for OSA with Professor Christian Guilleminault in 2015 and has continued to update the comprehensive sleep surgery protocol at Stanford.

His active areas of research include dynamic airway examination to optimize sleep surgery outcome, virtual surgical planning for facial skeletal surgery, and neuromodulation of the upper airway. He has continued to update the Stanford sleep surgery algorithm, which is published across textbooks of sleep medicine, otolaryngology, dentistry, and pulmonary medicine. Additionally, he has given keynote talks nationally and internationally at preeminent conferences across specialties. The talks are based on over 100 scientific articles and medical texts of my original scientific work on sleep and breathing.

1 CE credit available to AAPMD members