King’s College Hospital rolls out AI imaging to guide cardiac stents

TL;DR:

• King’s College Hospital NHS Foundation Trust has rolled out Abbott’s Ultreon 3.0 AI-enabled imaging system to support coronary angioplasty procedures, going live in April 2026.
• Around 500 patients a year at King’s are expected to benefit from procedures supported by the system, which provides real-time high-resolution views from inside coronary arteries.
• Resultsense view: this is a procedural AI deployment at a tier-one London teaching hospital — not a research pilot — and the trust is also leading UK training for the technology, which signals the technique is moving from showcase site to standard practice.

Ultreon 3.0, developed by Abbott Vascular, uses advanced AI techniques during angioplasty to provide detailed images directly from within a coronary artery patient’s blood vessel. It helps interventional cardiologists identify plaque build-up that may raise the risk of blood clots and assess how blood is flowing through the patient’s vessels, with the aim of more accurate stent placement.

What the system does

A coronary angioplasty widens a main blood vessel supplying the heart when it has become blocked or narrowed. Most procedures involve inserting a short wire mesh tube — a stent — into the artery and leaving it in place so blood can flow more freely. The Ultreon 3.0 system sits inside that workflow, helping clinicians decide which diseased arteries to stent and where to position the device.

The software was rolled out at King’s in April 2026 and currently runs in a small number of major heart centres worldwide. Dr Nilesh Pareek, consultant interventional cardiologist at King’s, said the technology enables the team “to improve our decision making and selection of diseased arteries for stenting procedures” and that around 500 patients a year are expected to benefit.

A UK training role

Pareek and his team are leading training for other UK sites adopting the technology, which extends the deployment’s reach beyond King’s own patient list. “By supporting the training of other sites across the UK in this new technology, we hope to help make sure as many patients as possible can benefit from this latest AI tool,” he said.

That training role matters because it shifts King’s from being a single deployment site to being part of the diffusion path for the technology across the NHS — a pattern increasingly common as UK trusts move from single-vendor pilots to coordinated multi-site adoption.

Context for NHS clinical AI adoption

This is the third NHS clinical AI deployment Resultsense has documented in the past week, following Doccla’s virtual care platform reporting 61% bed-day reductions and Heidi’s NHS documentation deployment. Each tackles a different bottleneck — preventing admissions, reducing clinician paperwork, and now improving precision inside the procedure itself. The pattern is consistent: vendor-published deployment data first, with independent multi-site evaluation expected to follow.

In August 2025, the National Institute for Health and Care Excellence conditionally recommended six digital cardiac rehabilitation platforms for use in the NHS during a three-year evidence-generation period. Ultreon 3.0 operates a stage earlier in the cardiac-care pathway, inside the procedure rather than recovery, but sits within the same NHS push to embed AI across the full pathway.

Looking forward

Watch for outcome data once King’s accumulates a meaningful patient cohort on the platform. The two metrics that will matter to commissioners are the rate of stent-related complications and the share of procedures where the imaging changes the cardiologist’s stent choice — the latter being the test of whether the AI is changing real clinical decisions, not just confirming them.