Brian F. Kavanagh, MD

Joint replacement specialist Brian Kavanagh, MD, is a staff orthopedic physician at Greenwich Hospital where he has performed more than 8000 surgeries over the past 35 years.

Board-certified by the American Board of Orthopaedic Surgery, Dr. Kavanagh graduated Princeton University and attended University of Connecticut School of Medicine. His internship and residency were performed at the Mayo Clinic, Mayo Graduate School of Medicine in Rochester, Minnesota. He served on the full-time faculty at the Mayo Graduate School of Medicine for seven years and on the teaching staff at Yale University School of Medicine in New Haven for five years. He was a Consultant in the Department of Orthopedics and Assistant Professor at the Mayo Clinic, where he specialized in hip and knee reconstruction. He was also an instructor of the hip and knee total joint fellowship program.

Dr. Kavanagh has authored and edited numerous articles and book chapters and serves on the editorial staff of the Journal of Arthroplasty, the Journal of Bone Joint Surgery, and Clinical Orthopaedics and Related Research. Also, he is an examiner for the American Board of Orthopaedic Surgery and a member of several specialty orthopedic societies, including The Hip Society.

Dr. Kavanagh has played an integral role in the evolution of joint replacement procedures. Twenty years ago, he was the first doctor in the Fairfield and Westchester region to perform “minimally-invasive quadriceps-sparing” total knee replacement. The technique does not damage the quadriceps tendon and requires less cutting of the muscle than in more conventional techniques. Advantages to this minimal incision technique include less blood loss, less tissue trauma, shorter hospital stay, faster recovery and a smaller scar. He has also done similar work in the field of hip replacement and uses a minimally invasive Anterior-based approach for hip replacement. This is a more stable approach with better access to the joint that has lower complication rates than other anterior approaches.