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

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 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.

Dr. Singh is an Associate Professor of Medicine, Medical Director, Cardiac Catheterization Laboratory at Barnes-Jewish Hospital and Director of Interventional Cardiology. He specializes in coronary and peripheral vascular interventional procedures and spends most of his time in the cardiac catheterization laboratory. His expertise is in complex coronary intervention and also the endovascular treatment of renovascular hypertension, and peripheral arterial occlusive diseases. In addition, he has been involved in research ranging from new coronary devices to intravascular ultrasound and pressure/flow assessment of coronary vessels. He is the Principal Investigator in several high profile multicenter trials evaluating the above. He is actively involved in resident/fellow education and rotate in the coronary care unit twice a year. He has two interventional fellows per year who work closely with him during their training, he also serves as their attending in ½ day in patient clinic. He has second and third year cardiology fellows involved in clinical research protocols in the cath lab and their work has produced three instrumental abstracts/papers which in the first 12 months were presented at major cardiovascular society meetings. Dr. Singh is also the Chairman of ARCH, one of the largest Midwest Interventional Symposium.

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 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.