Curious Legacy Bariatric Fellows Lead the Way

By Vicki Guinn

One night on call at Legacy Good Samaritan Medical Center, bariatric surgery fellow Dr. Ara G. Amirkhanian received an urgent call. A patient who had recently undergone gastric bypass surgery had returned with severe abdominal pain. Scans revealed a rare problem: The small intestine had become blocked. Working with Legacy surgeon Dr. Wan-Xing Hong, the team quickly took the patient back to the operating room. They removed the blockage and reconnected the intestines. The patient recovered within days.

“Although the problem was solved within hours, I continued to think about the case for days and wondered why these blockages happen,” Amirkhanian said. His search for answers led to a study recently published in Obesity Surgery, a leading international peer-reviewed journal.

Amirkhanian’s story begins far from the operating room. He grew up near Clemson, South Carolina, where he played Division I soccer as a midfielder for the Clemson Tigers men’s soccer team, competing in the Atlantic Coast Conference. In one season, he returned as the team’s top returning scorer with 12 points, including five goals and two game-winning strikes the year before.

After completing surgical residency in 2025, Amirkhanian joined the Legacy Health Bariatric Surgery Fellowship. Under the mentorship of Dr. Valerie Halpin, Legacy’s senior medical director for specialties, and general surgeon Dr. Yen-Yi Juo, he analyzed thousands of operations across the country using a national surgical database. The team found that robotic gastric bypass surgery was associated with a higher rate of early bowel blockage, even after accounting for factors such as a patient’s prior surgical history.

The findings highlight an important truth in surgery: Small technical details can make a big difference. For example, subtle choices — such as how surgeons close the fatty tissue around the intestines — may determine whether a patient has a smooth recovery or ends up back in the emergency room.

At Legacy Health, bariatric surgeons take these technical details seriously.  “Legacy Good Samaritan is the only accredited bariatric surgery fellowship training site in Oregon,” Halpin said. “Our fellows work beside experienced faculty who have cared for patients with severe obesity for more than two decades.”

Dr. Avishai Meyer, a bariatric surgeon with the Legacy Weight and Diabetes Institute, is widely recognized locally as an authority in robotic surgery and abdominal wall reconstruction.