Simple Education: Advances in Intravascular Imaging, September 2018

Prof Andrew SP Sharp qualified from Edinburgh Medical School in 1998 and was appointed as a Consultant Cardiologist at the Royal Devon and Exeter Hospital in 2011. He was appointed Honorary Associate Professor at the University of Exeter in 2018.

He conducted his early training at the Royal Infirmary of Edinburgh, before moving to London for his senior clinical training. He completed the prestigious Milan-Imperial Interventional Cardiology Fellowship programme, having spent a year in San Raffaele and Columbus Hospitals, Milan, Italy, under the tutelage of Professor Antonio Colombo. He also spent three years training in interventional cardiology at St Mary’s Hospital and The Hammersmith Hospital (Imperial College Hospitals) in London.

Professor Sharp was awarded an MD postgraduate research degree from the University of Edinburgh for his work on the hypertensive heart and now leads a large research programme at the Royal Devon and Exeter Hospital. He has been Principal Investigator in more than 30 ethically-approved research trials since 2012 and has published extensively. He is regularly invited to lecture at national and international conferences in the fields of coronary artery disease, pulmonary embolism and hypertension.

Prof Carlo Di Mario is Professor of Cardiology at the University of Florence and Director of the Structural 
Interventional Cardiology Division of the University Hospital Careggi, Florence, Italy. Previous posts included 15 years as 
Professor of Clinical Cardiology at Imperial College of Sciences,
Medicine & Technology, London and Consultant Cardiologist at 
the Royal Brompton Hospital. He also practiced at the San 
Raffaele University Hospital, Milan, Italy. He trained in Cardiology at the 
University of Padova, Italy, but he soon moved for interventional training at the Thoraxcentre of Rotterdam, the Netherlands, where he also completed a PhD in Intracoronary Ultrasound Imaging and Doppler. Despite his teaching, research and administrative commitments, he maintains an active clinical involvement performing more than 100 PCI per year with special interest in the treatment of calcified lesions, chronic total occlusions, bifurcations, and diffuse disease. He is a regular TAVI operator and certified implanter for the Medtronic Evolut R and Edwards Sapien 3 transcatheter aortic valves. He participated in more than 160 MitraClip implantations in London and Florence and has recently started direct annuloplasty with the CardioBand. Professor Di Mario pioneered the use of intracoronary Doppler, pressure measurement, intravascular ultrasound, optical coherence tomography, and near infrared spectroscopy. He was PI of the OPTICUS trial, failing to demonstrate superiority of IVUS guided stenting, and of the Lipid Rich Plaque study, due to report at TCT 2018. He was Principal Investigator of the DESTINI trial, using Doppler CRF to identify lesions in need of stenting, and of the CARESS in AMI trial, a large multicentre trial showing that patients who receive fibrinolytic therapy for ST-elevation myocardial infarction benefit from early angioplasty. This trial and a subsequent meta-analysis have led to a change in the European Society of Cardiology and AHA/ACC Guidelines for treatment of STEMI patients. 

Prof Carlo Di Mario cooperated with Dr Davies to the validation of iFR to assess lesion severity and discriminate the contribution of individual lesions, and with Dr Lyon in the intracoronary delivery of SERCA-2 genes via adenoviral vectors in the CUPID2 trial. He was the main recruiter of the DISRUPT-I-CAD study and is PI of the DISRUPT-II trial, both pioneering the use of coronary lithotripsy for calcified coronary lesions.

Dr Rasha Al-Lamee is an Interventional Cardiology Consultant at Imperial College Healthcare NHS Trust in London, UK. Dr Al-Lamee’s research interests are complex coronary intervention, coronary physiology and invasive intravascular assessment. She designed, conducted and led the ORBITA trial and is the lead author of the primary publication in The Lancet. At Imperial College, she is actively involved in the development and recruitment for a number of multi-centre clinical trials. Dr Al-Lamee has over 40 peer-reviewed publications and has presented at international Cardiology conferences worldwide throughout her clinical career. She studied at the University of Oxford and University College London. She went onto complete her training as a junior doctor on the Barts and the London Medical rotation before being appointed as a Specialist Registrar on the North West London Cardiology rotation in 2006. Dr Al-Lamee has twelve years of Cardiology experience and completed three years of Interventional Fellowship training at Hammersmith Hospital in London. She also spent a year training as an Interventional Fellow under the supervision of Professor Antonio Colombo in Milan. She completed specialist training in Cardiology in 2013.

Prof Javier Escaned  is Consultant Interventional Cardiologist / Associate Professor and Head of Section, Cardiology Department, Hospital Clinico San Carlos (Madrid, Spain). He trained as a cardiologist the United Kingdom (Queen Elizabeth University Hospital, Birmingham and Walsgrave Hospital, Coventry) before moving to the Thoraxcenter / Rotterdam (The Netherlands), where he obtained his PhD degree in 1994. Author of more than 200 scientific articles, books and book chapters on different aspects of interventional cardiology, imaging and physiology, his latest contribution is the textbook “Coronary Stenosis. Imaging, Structure and Physiology”, co-edited with Patrick W Serruys. He is currently co-director or EuroPCR. Some of his additional interests are philosophy, education and music.

Dr Nieves Gonzalo was born in Madrid, Spain in 1976. In 2006 she got the degree of Cardiologist after her training in Clinico San Carlos University Hospital in Madrid. After finishing her specialization she moved to Rotterdam in The Netherlands for a research fellowship in the Thoraxcenter, Erasmus University with the team of Professor Patrick Serruys. There, she worked mainly in intracoronary imaging techniques and bioabsorbable stents. In 2010 she obtained her PhD with the thesis “Optical coherence tomography for the assessment of coronary atherosclerosis and vessel response after stent implantation”. Currently she works in the Interventional Cardiology Department at Clinico San Carlos University Hospital in Madrid.

Prof Jacek Legutko graduated as a medical doctor in 1993 and has specialist degrees in both internal medicine and cardiology. His present appointments are as professor of medicine and interventional cardiologist at the Institute of Cardiology, Jagiellonian University Medical College, University Hospital in Krakow, Poland. Professor Legutko has been involved in more than 30 international clinical trials and has published more than 100 scientific papers in peer-reviewed medical journals. He is a member of several professional associations, including the European Society of Cardiology (ESC), Association for Percutaneous Cardiovascular Interventions of the European Society of Cardiology (EAPCI ESC), Polish Cardiac Society (PCS) and Association of Cardiovascular Interventions of the Polish Cardiac Society (ACVI PCS). Professor Legutko is Course Director of the Annual International Interventional Cardiology Workshop New Frontiers in Interventional Cardiology (NFIC) in Krakow. He has served as a life case operator and faculty member for several international meetings (TCT, EuroPCR, C3, WCCI, NFIC) and international preceptorships for FFR and IVUS. Professor Legutko received several awards, including the Polish Cardiac Society group award for innovations in cardiology in 2008, the Polish Cardiac Society group award for publication in 2007 and the 2013 Andreas Award for his personal impute on the development of interventional cardiology in Poland

Juliet Nilsson is the Creative Director of Simple Education, the online cardiology educational platform aggregating content from key courses, global intuitions and leaders in the field of interventional cardiology. She received a Master’s in Art History with Honours from Edinburgh University before joining the Creative Development team at Lightyears, Stockholm in 1998. Juliet continued in creative development in Copenhagen for the trail blazing e-commerce bureau AHEAD, and then as International Creative Director for Caput Community Software Solutions. Following a role as Senior Consultant at Halcyon Gallery in London and Copenhagen, Juliet founded Vind & Våg Publishing House in 2013, a creative development agency. Juliet has published several books under her own imprint and is currently the founder & advisor to the Nordic Art Agency.

Jurgen Ligthart has been working on intervention cardiology as a Cath lab technician since 1982, firstly to support the cardiologists in working with X-rays and positioning, or “how to get better angiograms and less X-ray dosage”.

With the first IVUS performed in man in 1989, he was soon interested in invasive imaging and especially in the interpretation of the images or “what lies between the lumen and the media”. With IVUS initially used as research tool he was soon convinced that using IVUS (and later other modalities) can make a difference for patients. A standard acquisition protocol for all patients, no exceptions, was in his opinion a must but it took till 1997 before he implemented the standard acquisition protocol in Erasmus MC, which is still the standard of all invasive imaging procedures. With the standardisation he started to review, interpret and report IVUS procedures like a radiologist would do. In 2006, he developed for Erasmus MC the first 2 days interactive IVUS course for physicians, with live cases from the Cath lab. This formula is still used for all their invasive imaging courses (IVUS and OCT). In 2008, he developed an invasive imaging database in Erasmus MC that is still in use and growing, containing 4600 patients and 12000 pullbacks, available for viewing and reviewing at 
any time.

In 2011, he started a part time one man consultancy company (LIMIC Medical) customers: Boston Scientific, Philips Volcano, St. Jude Medical, Terumo, InfraredX, ACIST, Abbott and congress and course-organising hospitals. Jurgen has had the great honour to work almost 35 years with Professor Patrick Serruys and also several years with Professor Carlo Di Mario, who was in Rotterdam his “partner in invasive imaging crime”.

Dr Ricardo Petraco is a NIHR Lecturer in interventional Cardiology at Imperial College London, performing his clinical work at Hammersmith Hospital. He has been working with coronary physiology at Imperial since 2010 on the development of the novel instantaneous wave-Free Ratio (iFR). Dr Petraco’s work with iFR has led to the proposition of the Hybrid iFR-FFR approach and has established iFR’s close relationship with coronary flow reserve (CFR). His interests in computer programming has led to the development of a software for automated analysis of coronary haemodynamics signals which is been used by many leading centres in the world. He has also pioneered the algorithm for iFR calculation without the need for an ECG signal, an approach which is now implemented in clinical consoles. He has secured several research grants and published extensively in the field of coronary physiology. His current research interests are on the development of methodologies to assess stenosis severity in situations of haemodynamic instability and on the understanding of how medical therapies modulate coronary resistance and flow. Clinically, his interests also include the use of intravascular imaging modalities to optimise PCI and has been engaged in IVUS training for cathlab staff and cardiology trainees.

Dr Sayan Sen is an internationally recognised Interventional Cardiologist based at the Hammersmith Hospital, London. His clinical expertise encompasses both general and interventional cardiology. Dr Sen’s research interests involve both first in man and larger multi-centre clinical trials. His research has been published in leading medical journals and has changed clinical practice around the world. Dr Sen leads the Imperial NHS Trust Cardiology Service for Central and West London. He routinely performs complex coronary angioplasty and TAVI. He is recognised as an expert in intra-coronary physiology and intravascular imaging and often performs live cases to International Conferences. 

Dr Sen's academic interests are dedicated to improving patient care. As such, they include the development and validation of new diagnostic tools, determining how study design can influence the clinical use of competing therapies and the development and application of tools that permit a more patient centred approach to therapy. One of the themes of his research is to determine which patients should be treated with stents. His PhD pioneered a new technique of stenosis evaluation (the instantaneous wave-free ratio, iFR). This index has been globally adopted by physicians to help guide how they treat patients with coronary artery disease. He currently leads a PhD program examining coronary haemodynamics in patients with valve disease.

Sayan teaches regularly, he is the course director of the Advanced Coronary Physiology Course for consultant cardiologists, which has been attended by hundreds of practicing interventional cardiologists from around the world. 

Dr Sen qualified from University College London with Distinction. In 2009 he was awarded the MRC Research Fellowship, to study haemodynamics in coronary artery bypass grafts, native coronary arteries and in patients with severe aortic stenosis. Sayan’s academic awards include the Royal Society of Medicine Investigator of the Year Award (All Sections, 2013), the Royal Society of Medicine President's Gold Medal (Cardiology section, 2013), the prestigious Imperial College Armstrong Medal and Prize (2012), the Young Investigator Award at the British Cardiac Intervention Society Advanced Coronary Intervention meeting (2012), and the Young Investigator Prize at the Translating Coronary Physiology and Biophysics to Clinical Applications Symposium, Amsterdam (2010).