From an unanswered clinical question to a wire-free platform
Coroview began with an unmet diagnostic need. During his PhD, Dr Robert Sykes found that patients undergoing invasive FFR assessment rarely also had thermodilution performed, so the microvasculature went unmeasured. Many people presenting with heart attacks or angina were left with debilitating symptoms and no explanation, despite an FFR assessment having excluded obstructive epicardial coronary disease.
The question that followed was simple: if the information is already present in the angiogram, does assessing the microvasculature require another wire, and can it be done accurately enough to correlate with symptoms and outcomes?
Timeline
Patients undergoing invasive FFR rarely also had thermodilution, so the microvasculature went unmeasured. Many people with heart attacks or angina were left with debilitating symptoms and no explanation, despite an FFR assessment having excluded obstructive epicardial disease.
As founder and inventor, Dr Sykes wrote the early algorithms and carried out the research and development himself, building and validating the first 300-patient dataset to predict IMR from individual hyperaemic responses and visual angiogram transits. University colleagues, including his supervisor Prof. Colin Berry and Dr Daniel Ang, contributed invasive coronary physiology data and acted as sounding boards throughout.
Encouraging early validation led to a patent application submitted with the University of Glasgow Technology Transfer Office, supported by MRC Impact Accelerator Account and MedTech Innovation awards. Dr Dylan Tan joined, supported across the MRC IAA, MedTech and ICDF awards, curating additional data for model progression and training, work which will also support his PhD thesis submission in 2027.
Dr Sykes set out the architecture and cloud-based system in use today, engineered in partnership with Bay Digital Consulting and FireFinch Software Ltd, turning a research method into a deployable full-stack platform.
A Living Laboratory Healthcare Innovation Symposium prize seeded presentations at EuroPCR 2025 Innovators’ Day and the European Society of Cardiology Congress 2025.
MedTech 2.0 support enabled automated flow metrics for repeatability and usability. Dr Sykes personally annotated the full corpus, producing what is now among the largest databases of annotated coronary angiograms for masking and model training. Health economic assessment and validation in further ANOCA and STEMI cohorts are under way.
The original ambition: a single wire-free assessment reporting 3D-FFR for epicardial disease and virtual IMR for the microvasculature. The patent has completed the PCT stage and national phase filings are under way in the USA, Europe and Japan.
Following prototype finalisation, the regulatory pathway and a University spin-out will take Coroview into routine clinical and research workflows. Virtual trials on retrospective and prospective datasets with symptom and outcome data, followed by prospective blinded studies alongside the established evidence base in INOCA, CMD and MINOCA, will build the case for mainstream adoption.
Funding and awards
Supported by competitive innovation funding and accelerator programmes.
