Philips has entered into an agreement to acquire Spectrawave, a US-based specialist in AI-powered medical imaging. Founded in 2017, the company from Bedford, Massachusetts, currently employs more than seventy people. Its intravascular imaging and physiological assessment technologies provide advanced solutions for the treatment of coronary artery disease, the most frequent type of heart disease, affecting more than 300 million people worldwide. Financial terms of the agreement aren’t disclosed.
The acquisition will expand Philips’ existing portfolio of intravascular imaging and physiological assessment devices, which integrate into its Azurion platform. “We’re doubling down on image-guided therapy and expanding in the coronary intervention segment with the addition of Spectrawave’s AI-powered innovations in high-definition intravascular imaging and angio-based physiological assessment,” comments CEO Roy Jakobs. “With this announcement, we continue to expand the role of minimally invasive image-guided therapy procedures, which are associated with better patient outcomes and improved cost-effectiveness,” adds Bert van Meurs, who leads the image-guided therapy business at Philips.
Spectrawave’s Hypervue intravascular imaging platform combines optical coherence tomography and near-infrared spectroscopy with rapid setup, acquisition and automated AI image analysis to provide detailed structural and compositional images of the coronary arteries during percutaneous interventions. The company’s X1-FFR is an angiography-derived, AI-enabled physiology solution that calculates fractional flow reserve from a single coronary angiogram, providing a non-invasive ischemia assessment and turning routine X-ray images into coronary physiology data for simplified percutaneous coronary intervention workflows. Together with Philips’ complementary portfolio, both systems expand clinicians’ toolbox.
