Advances in Co-registration, Coronary Physiology & Intra Coronary Imaging - Day One

Dr.Akiko Maehara is a Professor at Columbia University Medical Center and work as a Director of Intravascualr Imaging and MRI Core Laboratories at Cardiovascular Research Foundation In New York. She is an expert of intravascular imging (Intraascular ultrasound, Optical coherence tomography, Infrared spectroscopy) to detect vulnerable plauqe and optimize PCI.

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.

Dr. Bruce Samuels is an interventional cardiologist on staff at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center (CSMC) in Los Angeles, California. Dr. Samuels completed his medical studies at Albert Einstein College of Medicine in New York before returning to Southern California to complete his residency and chief residency in Internal Medicine at Harbor-UCLA Medical Center. At CSMC, he trained in both general and interventional cardiology before joining the medical staff there. In addition to his clinical practice in coronary intervention, Dr. Samuels has actively participated in numerous interventional trials including IVUS guided therapy, coronary physiology and microvascular disease. He is also working closely with the Barbra Streisand Women’s Heart Center based at CSMC, working as an interventionalist in the active coronary reactivity research there. As co-chair of a 30-day readmissions task force, he has helped to shape policy for CSMC in its efforts to improve quality delivery of care. He has frequently been invited as faculty to many scientific meetings and is a sought after speaker for numerous peer educational platforms. Dr. Samuels is a fellow of the American College of Cardiology and is Board Certified in Internal Medicine, Cardiovascular Diseases, and Interventional Cardiology. He is married with three sons; his outside interests include contemporary art and long distance running.

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 Fausto Rigo graduated in Medicine in 1982 and specialized in Cardiovascular Diseases and in Sports Medicine at the University of Padua. From 1985 to 2011, he was a consultant Cardiologist at the Division of Cardiology of Umberto I Hospital of Mestre-Venice. Since 2011, Dr Rigo was Head of Division of Cardiology of dell’Angelo Hospital in Mestre-Venice, Italy. In 2022, Dr Fausto became Head of Center of Cardiology in Villa Salus Hospital/Santa Camillo IRCSS in Venice. He is author of co-author of over 130 papers all registered in PubMed, published and peer reviewed international journals, and over 250 original or inviter oral presentations, at the main scientific events. Impact factor > 500. Author of numerous chapters of books on Imaging in Cardiology. Field of interest: Coronary artery disease, Cardiomyopathy, Heart failure, Expert in Echocardiography/Stress Echocardiography, Magnetic Resonance and CT-Scan, and pioneer in the implementation of coronary flow and reserve assessment with ultrasound.

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 Jan Piek is a clinical academic and interventional cardiologist at the Amsterdam University Medical Centers at the University of Amsterdam. At the moment, he has a full-time position as a professor of clinical cardiology at the AMC Heart Center in Amsterdam. His particular interest is interventional cardiology in which field he has been active for almost 30 years. In his academic position, he has supervised approximately 55 PhD students on the theme diagnosis and treatment of coronary artery disease. The topic of his research work focusses on translational aspects of coronary atherosclerosis. This started in the area of arteriogenesis after the completion of his thesis in 1992 followed by a close collaboration with the research group of Prof. Wolfgang Schaper from Bad Nauheim in Germany. In the same period, he started pioneering with the company Cardiometris, Mountain View, Ca, USA, that finally led the development of guidewires, equipped with pressure and Doppler sensors, as a technical refinement for guidance of coronary interventions. Moreover, subsequent studies performed on reperfusion injury with dedicated centers in the US and Germany, provided novel insights into the inflammatory response following acute myocardial infarction. His pioneering work on coronary hemodynamics led to creation of an international network of specialized centers. The DEFINE FLOW study involves a collaboration between Texas Heart Institute and the Amsterdam University Medical Center on combined pressure and flow measurements and was conducted in 12 sites worldwide. The last three years, he has worked as the editor in chief of the Netherlands Heart Journal.

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.

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.

Professor Rajesh Kharbanda is a Consultant Cardiologist Oxford University Hospitals, UK with over 20 years of experience in treating patients with a wide range of heart conditions including angina, valve disease, heart failure and irregular heart rhythm. He has special expertise in the treatment of coronary artery disease by coronary angioplasty and stenting including complex angioplasty techniques as well as Structural Heart interventions. He has published and co-authored over 240 scientific papers in peer-reviewed journals and actively involved in international trials evaluating various coronary and transcatheter valve technologies.

Dr Roberto Spina is an Interventional Cardiologist trained in Australia and the USA and is a Fellow of the Royal Australasian College of Physicians. He specialises in transcatheter structural heart interventions, having undertaken a Structural Heart Intervention Advanced Fellowship at the New York Presbyterian Hospital/Columbia University Medical Center in New York, USA, and complex coronary intervention. He strongly believes in the routine use of intravascular imaging in performing percutaneous coronary intervention.