Acist Medical Systems Forms Distribution Partnership With Medis Medical Imaging

December 15, 2020—Acist Medical Systems, Inc., a Bracco Group Company, announced a formal distribution partnership with Medis Medical Imaging to comarket in North America. Medis is headquartered in Leiden, the Netherlands. The company develops postprocessing software for the quantification of cardiovascular images.

This partnership is focused on Quantitative Flow Ratio (QFR), which is Medis’ noninvasive angiography-based physiologic assessment of the presence and extent of coronary artery disease.

As noted in the announcement, Medis’ QFR delivers image-based functional assessment of coronary obstructions from standard coronary angiograms. The QFR approach applies advanced mathematical modeling to accurately and effectively measure the physiologic and anatomic extent of a patient’s coronary artery disease. QFR provides fast procedure times without an invasive pressure wire or adenosine administration.

The QFR analysis is performed during the interventional procedure. The QFR analysis output is coregistered with the angiogram and automatically identifies and prioritizes any functionally significant coronary obstructions. QFR provides the health care professional with extensive and quantitative physiologic imaging results to support the patient’s diagnosis and better inform the patient’s treatment, stated Acist Medical Systems.

“QFR represents a significant advance for assessment of coronary artery disease in the cath lab,” commented interventional cardiologist Morton Kern MD, in the press release. “Like other angiographically derived FFR systems, QFR will let the angiographer see the physiologic impact of the stenoses within a vessel of interest and make an informed decision on whether to stent or not without the need of a pressure wire or adenosine. While still in early clinical use, QFR and other angio-derived [fractional flow reserve] systems will become a dominant method in the coming years by improving the patient experience and simplifying [percutaneous coronary intervention] decision-making.” Dr. Kern is Chief of Cardiology at the VA Long Beach Healthcare System in Long Beach, California.