Shares in Ltd () surged after a prestigious London hospital published a favorable a study paper on the medtech's VMS system.
The cardiology group at the Royal Free Hospital in London, UK, has published a study entitled “Two-dimensional knowledge-based volumetric reconstruction of the right ventricle documents short-term improvement in pulmonary hypertension” in echocardiography – a type of ultrasound scan used by heart specialists.
The crew at the Royal Free Hospital know Ventripoint's VMS diagnostic device well, as it was the hospital's Dr Johannes Schwaiger who completed a previous study on pulmonary arterial hypertension (PAH).
That study showed VMS was on a par with magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) scans in terms of accuracy, and led to speculation that VMS might be a useful tool in determining how heart disease patients were responding to treatment.
The latest study confirms the ability of the VMS system to follow patients with enlarged right ventricles (RV) – one of the chambers of the heart - and accurately measure small but medically-significant changes in volume and function.
This ability to monitor clinical outcomes shortly after the initiation of therapy is important to determine if the therapy is working well or if a new therapeutic approach is required. The VMS detected the remodeling of the RV to reduce its size in patients who improved and an increase in RV size in patients with worse clinical outcomes including death.
Armed with this information, medical professionals could instigate more vigorous therapy for those with an RV that was declining in size.
“Ventricular remodeling in PAH can be differentiated into two patterns: adaptive remodeling with concentric hypertrophy and preserved function, and maladaptive remodeling with eccentric hypertrophy and worsening function. Our study shows that within several months a change from one pattern to the other can occur with medical therapy,” the authors of the study said.
In short, the authors concluded that the VMS Heart Analysis System – the “two-dimensional knowledge-based volumetric reconstruction” of the study paper's title, could be reliably used “in a busy clinical setting to follow-up right-ventricular indices in pulmonary hypertension”.
Shares in VentriPoint, up 138% year-to-date, rose to C$0.285 in morning trading from Friday's close of US$0.27.