Infraredx, a Burlington, Mass.-based cardiovascular imaging company, is collaborating with Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH) and coronary imaging researcher Gary Tearney, M.D., Ph.D., professor of pathology at Harvard Medical School, Mike and Sue Hazard Family MGH Research Scholar and founder of the Tearney Lab at the Wellman Center for Photomedicine at MGH. The multi-year collaboration will focus on research and development of new and combination technologies that aim to provide enhanced information about coronary disease in patients.

Tearney is best known for pioneering research efforts developing Optical Coherence Tomography (OCT), an imaging technology that uses light-scattering to image coronary arteries. Infraredx and Tearney first collaborated over a decade ago on the development of the company’s near-infrared spectroscopy (NIRS) technology, which now is integrated into the company’s dual-modality intravascular TVC Imaging System. The TVC Imaging System is the only FDA-cleared technology capable of rapidly, specifically and reliably identifying lipid core plaques, which are known to complicate stenting procedures and are suspected to be the vulnerable plaques that cause most heart attacks, using NIRS and providing vessel structure information using intravascular ultrasound (IVUS).

“Coronary imaging has rapidly evolved over the past decade and has become an important part of the practice of diagnostic and interventional cardiology,” said Tearney. “Our partnership will focus on ways to harness the collective value of current imaging modalities in order to provide clinicians with more comprehensive information on the coronary vasculature to help guide treatment decisions.”