A surgeon rehearses a stent placement inside a patient’s blood vessels on a computer before making the first incision. The problem is that current stenting procedures rely heavily on a clinician’s experience and two-dimensional scans, leading to mismatches between the chosen device and the patient’s unique vessel geometry. This mismatch causes complications—such as stent misplacement or vessel damage—that require costly follow-up surgeries. The PreSize platform solves this by combining patient scan data with computational models of stent mechanics to predict exactly how a device will behave once deployed. If this software succeeds, hospitals could reduce complication rates and the associated costs of corrective procedures. Surgeons would select the optimal stent size and type for each patient before entering the operating room, shortening surgery times and improving outcomes. For the health system, fewer complications mean fewer readmissions and lower overall spending on cardiovascular care. The company, Oxford Heartbeat, has already won the NHS Innovation Award and been named a top healthcare start-up by WIRED, indicating strong early validation of the approach.
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Our goal is to make cardiovascular surgeries more efficient and safe. This project develops the PreSize platform, a novel clinical decision-support solution that helps clinicians plan and rehearse stent placements inside blood vessels. Using cutting-edge computational modelling, we make the best use of available patient scans and stent device mechanics to accurately predict the behaviour of devices inside each patient's vessel configuration. This allows clinicians to optimise device selection, reducing the number of complications and the associated cost of stenting surgeries for hospitals and our society. We are a start-up company specifically created to bring this technology to hospitals. We currently run IUK Biomedical Catalyst Primer (BMC-P) project, and are incubated by The Royal Academy of Engineering. The results of our previous projects have received numerous awards, including the NHS Innovation Award 2017 from Health Enterprise East (HEE). We were named the "Best Healthcare Start-up of 2018" by WIRED magazine and were the national winner at the prestigious Medilink UK Healthcare Business Awards 2017\. We were selected to be part of the Digital Health London Accelerator (DHLA) programme, and previously one of the 6 startups selected globally by Philips Healthcare Accelerator, as well as featured in two Forbes articles as "founders striving to change the world" and "one of the new British start-ups to watch closely", two WIRED articles: "These are the healthcare start-ups you need to know about" and "From AI doctors to 3D X-rays, the future of healthcare is already here", and have been featured in The Times, Financial Times, etc. Our aim is to grow Oxford Heartbeat to be the leading provider of clinical decision support tools, to improve healthcare and define the medicine of tomorrow.
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