Thomas Yohannan, MD, received his medical degree in 2011 from the University of Illinois College of Medicine in Chicago. He completed an internship in 2012 and a radiology residency in 2016 at Aurora St. Luke’s Medical Center in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, where he won the Aurora Health Care Radiology Resident Teacher Award. He then completed a clinical fellowship in nuclear medicine at UCSF in 2017 and a clinical instructor year at Stanford University in 2018. Dr. Yohannan joined Kaiser Permanente East Bay in 2018 and was most recently Chief of Nuclear Medicine and Radiation Safety Officer, as well as Peer Review Liaison.

Dr. Yohannan’s current research focuses on improving lung cancer diagnosis and staging with the aim of identifying why the current standard of care, FDG PET, has limited utility for characterizing and staging subsolid lung nodules/cancer, and developing methods for better staging and characterization of T1 lung cancers. Previous research has focused on factors associated with lymph node metastases in lung carcinoids, using FDG-PET/CT to predict tumor response to immunotherapy, evaluation of 68Ga-PSMA-11 PET in biochemical recurrence of prostate cancer, and use of 18 F-florbetaben whole-body PET/MRI for evaluation of systemic amyloid deposition.

While at Kaiser, Dr. Yohannan led the development of multiple tools for imaging decision and therapeutic coordination support. This included a multi department effort to create an application that standardized the physician-to-patient messaging sent to thyroid cancer patients in multiple languages. In 2021, he was honored by The Permanente Medical Group Leadership Academy for his work. He is also a frequent physician educator for Kaiser Permanente East Bay and Northern California regional medical centers.