My Best IVUS Learning Cases

Dr Sharp qualified from Edinburgh Medical School in 1998. He was appointed as a Consultant Cardiologist at the Royal Devon and Exeter Hospital in 2011, before moving to the University Hospital of Wales, in Cardiff, UK in the summer of 2019, where he is now Honorary Professor of Cardiology. He conducted his early training at the Royal Infirmary of Edinburgh, before moving to London for his senior clinical training. He completed the 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. Prof Sharp was awarded an MD postgraduate research degree from the University of Edinburgh for his work on the hypertensive heart and leads a large research programme in Wales. He has an international reputation for leading the development of device-based treatments for hypertension (in particular that of renal denervation) and pulmonary embolism, as well as the advancement of intracoronary imaging and physiology.

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. 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. He 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.

Prof. Eric Van Belle is Professor of Interventional Cardiology at the University of Lille and Head of Catheterization laboratories, Cardiology Department at the University Hospital of Lille.
He is a fellow of the French Society of Cardiology, the European Society of Cardiology and
the American College of Cardiology. A member of the European Association of Percutaneous Coronary Intervention (EAPCI) and a member of the director bureau of the French Working Group of Interventional Cardiology (GACI), he is the Director of the French Interventional Cardiology Training Program, and reviewer of multiple Medical Journals and Abstracts. His research interests include basics and clinical aspects of the outcome of high risk population such as diabetics and post-MI patients following percutaneous coronary interventions (PCI),
the use of biomarkers for risk prediction and therapeutic strati cation at the time of PCI, the role of angiogenesis and collateral circulation for endogenous cardiovascular repair and the use of gene therapy and stem cell therapy for regenerating cardiovascular function including myocardial and valve function. More recently it included also the optimization of transcatheter aortic valve intervention (TAVI), in particular the use of ore-procedural imaging and the understanding of the role post-procedural aortic regurgitation.

Prof. Flavio L. Ribichini is Full Professor of Cardiovascular Medicine and Director of the Division of Cardiovascular Medicine of the University of Verona, where he has served since 2006. Since 2022, he has been a chief of the cardio-thoracic department. Dedicated full time to Interventional Cardiology since 1993, he was Associate Professor of Cardiology and Director of the Catheterization Laboratory of the University Amedeo Avogadro in Novara, Italy from 2002 to 2006. He also worked as a full-time staff cardiologist at the Intensive Care Unit and the Catheterization Unit at Ospedale Santa Croce in Cuneo, Italy in the nineties. Prof. Ribichini obtained his medical degree in 1986 at the National University of Cordoba, Argentina, and then completed his fellowship in Internal Medicine in 1988. He obtained his board certification in Cardiology at the University of Torino, Italy in 1992. He had extensive training around the world in interventional cardiology, including at the University of Paris VII, Henry Mondor Hospital; Stanford University, California; and Mount Sinai Medical School, New York. In addition, he was a awarded a Research Fellowship of the ESC at the OLVZ Cardiovascular Centre, Aalst, Belgium. Prof. Ribichini is the Director of the School of Cardiovascular Medicine and the President of the PhD Department of the University of Verona. He is member of the Editorial Board of the European Heart Journal, member of the Executive Board of the European Association of Percutaneous Cardiovascular Interventions (EAPCI), member ESC Guidelines Task Force, and of the of the scientific committee of the Euro-PCR and the TCT. He is Coordinator, Principle Investigator, and member of the steering committees of several clinical trials and has authored over 350 full publications on clinical and basic cardiovascular research in peer reviewed scientific journals available on PubMed with an H index: 42.

Dr Justin Davies is founder and CEO of Wondr Medical, inventor of iFR, and clinical academic and consultant interventional cardiologist at the National Heart and Lung Institute, Imperial College London.