When Should We Be Using IVUS & Coronary Physiology in Clinical Practise?

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 and Honorary Associate Professor by the University of Exeter in 2018 before moving to the University Hospital of Wales, in Cardiff, U.K., in the summer of 2019. 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. 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. 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 300 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.

Dr. Nijjer is a Consultant Cardiologist and Senior Clinical Lecturer at Imperial College London. He works at both the Hammersmith Hospital and Chelsea & Westminster Foundation NHS Trust, as well as leading private Hospitals in London including the Wellington and Cromwell Hospitals. He is the President-elect of the Cardiology Section of the Royal Society of Medicine, and he was selected as an Emerging Leader for the British Cardiovascular Society. He specialises in coronary intervention and focused his clinical practice in the management of ischaemic heart disease. His practice encompasses all aspects of cardiology. In his PhD research, funded by the Medical Research Council (UK) and awarded by Imperial College he developed of new intracoronary physiology techniques, specifically iFR and iFR-pullback and Co-registration. He has published almost 100 peer-reviewed papers in respected journals, including the New England Journal of Medicine and The Lancet. He has also written several books.