ARTICLE SUMMARY:
Provisio Medical, which was founded by a medtech veteran experienced in intracoronary imaging, has developed a platform called SLT IVUS (Sonic Lumen Tomography IVUS), which, with the ability to be incorporated into a support crossing catheter, rapidly and automatically gives clinicians one of the important metrics for evaluating a diseased vessel: a vessel’s flow lumen size.
Provisio Medical was founded in 2014 by S.Eric Ryan, MD, a veteran of the medtech industry with an unusual depth of experience in intracoronary imaging. He was the founding chief technology officer of InfraReDx (now part of Nipro), which, at its founding in 1998, was perhaps the first company with a stated mission of identifying vulnerable plaque in real time, using near infrared spectroscopy. He was most recently a senior executive at Volcano, which developed intracoronary assessment tools including IVUS and FFR (fractional flow reserve) products. (Philips Medical acquired Volcano in 2014 for $1.2 billion.)
As the former head of global clinical, scientific, and medical affairs for Volcano just prior to the Philips acquisition, Ryan says he was part of many clinical trials showing the clinical benefits of the intracoronary imaging technologies. “But we also know what a struggle it is to get physicians to use this technology.” (See, “Is Better IVUS the Missing Link in Peripheral Vascular Disease?” MedTech Strategist, February 2024.)
