Advances in Intra Coronary Imaging and Physiology Co-Registration course (July 2018)

Prof Andrew Sharp qualified from Edinburgh Medical School in 1998 and is Professor of Cardiology at the University Hospital of Wales and Cardiff University in the U.K. 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 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 his research interests include intracoronary imaging and physiology. as well as the use of device-based treatments for hypertension and pulmonary embolism.

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.

Dr Christopher Cook is a Medical Research Council Clinical Fellow at Imperial College London, undertaking a PhD in coronary physiology under the supervision of Dr Justin Davies. He studied Medicine at University College London (UCL) and graduated with Distinction (Clinical Medicine and Clinical Sciences) in his final MBBS Examinations in 2009. He achieved a First Class (Honours) Bachelor of Science degree in Physiology undertaking a period of research at The Hatter Cardiovascular Institute. He was awarded ‘The Dean’s List’ for outstanding performance in the Faculty of Life Sciences. In total he was awarded 17 prizes including the prestigious Gold Medal Medicine (proxime accessit). In 2014, he was awarded the Imperial Valve and Cardiovascular Course Young Investigator Prize. In 2015 he was awarded the inaugural EuroPCR’s Got Talent Award. In 2017 he was elected onto the EuroPCR Clinical Programme Committee.

Prof Hitoshi Matsuo is currently President of Gifu Heart Center,
and Clinical Visiting Professor of Cardiology in Aichi Medical University. He graduated from Jichi Medical School in 1986 and completed his residency in Gifu Prefectural Gifu Hospital. In 1987, during his residency period, Prof Hitoshi Matsuo spent one year at Johns Hopkins Medical Institutions in Baltimore as a research fellow in the Nuclear Medicine Department under the supervision of Professor Henry N Wagner Jr. From 1988, he returned to Gifu Prefectural Hospital where he dedicated clinical research work on physiology and interventional cardiology using nuclear medicine and pressure wires. He received an annual award of Japanese Society of Nuclear Medicine in 1995 and the Clinical Research Award of Japanese Society of Interventional Cardiology in 2004. Thereafter, he moved to Toyohashi Heart Center as co-director of the catheterization laboratory from 2007 and returned to Gifu as the Director of Cardiovascular Medicine in 2009. Dr Matsuo now participates and contributes to many international multi-center trials including DEFINE-FLAIR, the international multicenter FFRCT registry (ADVANCE registry), 3V-FFR FRIENDS study and FAVOR2 Europe and Japan, DEFINE FLOW study.

Prof Javier Escaned is Head of Section (Interventional Cardiology Section) at Hospital Clinico San Carlos / Complutense University (Madrid, Spain). He trained in the United Kingdom as Specialist in Cardiology and obtained his PhD in The Netherlands. Author of >600 indexed scientific articles on interventional cardiology, imaging and physiology (h-index 74) and over 30 years of experience as PCI operator, he regularly lectures and performs live cases at major scientific and educational meetings. He is a recipient of the European Society of Cardiology (ESC) Silver Medal and the Andreas Grüntzig Award for his contributions to the fiedl fo Interventional Cardiology. Main areas of expertise include complex PCI, intracoronary diagnostics and functional coronary angiography. His track record in coronary physiology comprises being investigator on pioneer FFR trials like DEFER (1998), collaborator with Justin Davies in the validation and clinical implementation of iFR, and developer of new tools for the assessment of coronary microcirculation. Editorial roles include Deputy Editor EHJ, Advisory Editor Eurointervention, editor of the textbooks “Coronary Stenosis: Imaging, Structure and Physiology” and “Physiological Assessment of Coronary Stenoses and the Microcirculation". Recent board positions include EAPCI board / Education Committee Chair, ESC WG Coronary Pathophysiology and Microcirculation, EuroCTO Board. Recent trials as Principal Investigator include ADVISE II, DEFINE FLAIR, SYNTAX II, PIONEER IV, Cerebral-Coronary-Connection (C3), DCR4Contrast, INOCA LongCovid and AID ANGIO. Additional interests are philosophy and music.

Juliet Nilsson is a creative manager at Simple Education, UK.

Dr Justin Davies is a honorary 
interventional cardiologist at Hammersmith Hospital, Imperial College NHS Trust, London. After training at Imperial College, he won a prestigious BHF research fellowship to study arterial haemodynamics. Since then he has continued to
work on the development of mathematical algorithms to aid understanding of large artery physiology and to develop new tools to assess arterial disease. The holder of several patents,
he has published widely in the field of hypertension, coronary and large artery physiology and is the winner of many national and international awards. He has several international collaborations, and is the developer of iFR and the co-principal investigator of the ADVISE studies, the DEFINE-FLAIR, ORBITA and DEFINE-PCI studies. Justin also has an interest in renal denervation, and has lead the first-in-man studies to evaluate the safety of this technique to patients with chronic systolic heart failure (REACH studies).

Dr Nieves Gonzalo is Consultant Interventional Cardiologist at the Interventional Cardiology Department at Clinico San Carlos University Hospital in Madrid. She obtained her Specialist Certification in Cardiology after training at Clinico San Carlos University Hospital in Madrid. Subsequently, she underwent a research fellowship at Thoraxcenter, Erasmus University Rotterdam (The Netherlands) under the supervision of Professor Patrick Serruys, focused mainly in intracoronary imaging 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”. Her track record includes over 170 articles indexed in PubMed, as well as book chapters in Interventional Cardiology textbooks. Recent research projects as principal investigator includes a study about the assessment of neoatherosclerosis and its clinical impact in patients with restenosis (RIBS IV and V OCT substudy) and research regarding vessel injury and healing evaluation with different stent platforms evaluated with OCT (VISTA study). Dr Gonzalo is a dedicated educationalist with involvement in many areas of complex PCI, serving currently as Deputy Editor for Eurointervention and Committee Member of EuroPCR.

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 Sukhjinder Nijjer is a Consultant Cardiologist and Honorary Senior Clinical Lecturer at Imperial College London. He is the President of Cardiology at the Royal Society of Medicine and is the Communication Lead for the British Cardiovascular Intervention Society. He works at the Hammersmith Hospital as an Interventional Cardiologist and is an expert in Coronary Physiology. His PhD research focused on the development of instantaneous wave-free ratio (iFR) pullback and co-registration. He has published over 100 original academic papers and has involved in the DEFINE-FLAIR, SYNTAX-II and ORBITA-1 and ORBITA-2 research studies.