ABSTRACT
The successful deployment of a new medical technology is dependent on numerous factors. If we think in terms of what is necessary and what is sufficient, then the requirements can be distilled to relevance and execution. Relevance is hard to define and harder to achieve, but what is meant here is the applicability of the technology to a genuine clinical need. This is often a collaborative process between research clinicians and development engineers, since most developments precede their potential applications. Execution, the implementation of the technology for a given application, is also an iterative process but easier to achieve and measure. The concentration here will be on the execution of optical coherence tomography (OCT) technology for intravascular imaging, specifically the approach first implemented by LightLab™ imaging and released for cardiology studies beginning about 2001.
