Shockwave Medical
Project:
The Curious Case of Coronary
Calcium
Tools
VR Experience Design & Development
Script & Narrative Development
Live Action Production (Multi-Location)
CGI & 3D Artery Visualisation
OCT / Imaging Integration
KOL Engagement & Filming
Post-Production & VFX
Diagnosis
This project for Shockwave Medical set out to do something that a PowerPoint had never managed: make a physician feel what coronary calcium really means. Not just for the artery, but for the patient.
The Curious Case of Coronary Calcium is a 25-minute immersive VR experience that follows a real patient case, presented by two of the world's leading interventional cardiologists, Prof. James Spratt of St George's Hospital, London, and Dr. Margaret McEntegart of Columbia University Irving Medical Center, New York. It begins with the death of John Hunter in 1793, travels through two centuries of imaging history, and ends inside a coronary artery, watching Shockwave IVL fracture calcium in real time.
Shot across four landmark London locations: the Royal College of Surgeons, the Old Operating Theatre, a London café, and a historic crypt; and combining live action with cutting-edge CGI, the experience has been deployed at major international congresses and used as a field sales tool across Shockwave's commercial teams. A year on from launch, it remains the most substantial VR medical education project Made Clear has produced.
Pre-procedural planning
The primary challenges Shockwave faced were:
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The "case-in-a-box" problem. Shockwave's commercial teams were visiting physicians in hospitals and relying on the same format as every other medtech company: a PowerPoint, a KOL on a laptop, a dry run through the data. The brief was to make this encounter unforgettable, and to make it work both in a congress setting and as a portable field tool.
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The imaging gap. Only around 20% of calcified coronary cases receive advanced imaging such as CT or OCT. A core objective of the experience was to show, viscerally, what physicians miss when they rely on angiography alone, and what becomes possible when they don't.
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Making IVL's mechanism of action felt, not just explained. The unique physics of intravascular lithotripsy is counterintuitive: the way acoustic shockwaves travel through tissue and fracture calcium irrespective of its position. Existing animations had described it. We needed physicians to experience it.
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Sustaining a 25-minute headset experience. The audience is time-poor, scientifically rigorous, and deeply sceptical of anything that feels like marketing dressed up as education. The experience had to earn every minute.
The Procedure
We started where all good stories start: with a death. The very first documented case of coronary calcification belongs to John Hunter, celebrated surgeon, founder of St George's Hospital, who died of a heart attack in 1793. His post-mortem noted that his coronary arteries resembled "bony tubes." It was one of the earliest descriptions of the condition that Shockwave IVL exists to treat, and it gave us our opening.
From there, we built a 25-minute journey through the history of coronary imaging and into a real patient case: Jenny, a 67-year-old retired police officer with dense eccentric calcium in her LAD, treated by Dr. McEntegart using Shockwave IVL. Prof. Spratt guides the historical and scientific narrative. Margaret guides the clinical one. Jenny provides the human reason for all of it.
The structure moves from history to diagnosis to procedure to outcome. It’s shot across four landmark London locations, with CGI fly-throughs built from Jenny's actual OCT and CT imaging. The user enters the artery at pre-procedure, post-IVL, and post-stent, watching the calcium fracture and the lumen expand in real time. Jenny's final scene, nine months later, back in the café, walking again, closes the loop.
The experience was designed to do one specific thing: close the gap between knowing the data and believing it.
The outcome
The Curious Case of Coronary Calcium launched at EuroPCR and has since been deployed at multiple international congresses including Southwest Calcium in Bristol, where it received strong qualitative responses from attending physicians. A questionnaire completed by approximately 50 respondents found near-universal engagement with the experience and a significant shift in how participants described their understanding of calcium. One response captured the ambition of the project in a single line:
"I knew the data. But watching this — I believed it."
Because facts inform. But the right stories, told in the right way, make people feel, remember and act.
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