Intravascular imaging (IVI) continues to gain physician attention and increased clinical use as a crucial means of guiding least invasive cardiovascular procedures. Cardiologists rely on intravascular ultrasound (IVUS) to optimize stent and related therapies, guide difficult procedures, and identify otherwise undetected underlying vascular disease. The IVI market is the third largest segment of the interventional cardiology market with 2009 worldwide (WW) revenues estimated at US$600 MM. Additionally, the IVI market is one of the fastest growing market segments within the interventional cardiology market.
IVUS image quality, especially resolution, has improved very little since its commercial introduction in the early 1990s. This lack of meaningful product improvement has led to increased cardiologist interest in alternative imaging modalities, such as Optical Coherence Tomography (OCT) and Near Infrared Spectroscopy (NIRS). The potential benefit of OCT and NIRS will have to be measured against the inherent complexity and challenges to practicality of those technologies in the cardiac catheterization laboratory.
Silicon Valley Medical Instruments, Inc. (SVMI) is a medical device start-up located in the San Francisco Bay Area. SVMI is focused on the development of a high-definition IVUS (HD-IVUS) product to meet the clinical needs of interventional cardiologists. The goal is to provide a genuinely enhanced IVUS product with dramatically improved image quality, image resolution, and ease of use. A carefully engineered integration of markedly improved transducer, catheter, and system design has resulted in an IVUS system that produces near optical image resolution. HD-IVUS has the potential to offer new image guidance insight for future interventional cardiology technologies such as bifurcation and bioabsorbable stents.
The same engineering integration will produce a product with lower manufacturing costs than those currently commercially available IVUS systems. This is crucial considering the increasingly cost-conscious health care environment. Finally, the IVUS product development efforts at SVMI have provided a platform for future catheter-based image guidance of structural heart, selected electrophysiology, and related cardiovascular procedures.
To learn more about SVMI and HD-IVUS, please visit [http://www.svmii.com].