Murali Aravamudan, Co-Founder and CEO of nference, joins Dr. Jonathan Piccini for a visionary main tent conversation exploring how artificial intelligence is redefining cardiovascular medicine. A serial entrepreneur and engineer with a track record of building transformative technology companies, Murali has turned his focus to life sciences through nference and its affiliated ventures, leveraging AI to make biomedical knowledge computable at unprecedented scale.

Together, Murali and Dr. Piccini will examine how massive multimodal datasets—from electronic health records to imaging, genomics, and physiologic signals—are enabling a new era of predictive and precision cardiovascular care. The discussion will explore the intersection of AI, electrophysiology, and translational innovation, including how partnerships between technology companies, health systems, and clinicians can accelerate discovery and improve patient outcomes. Attendees will gain insight into the opportunities and challenges of implementing AI in real-world practice, the evolving role of data-driven medicine, and what the next decade of intelligent cardiovascular care may look like.

Artificial intelligence is reshaping how we detect, diagnose, and manage arrhythmias—but what is the role of digital transformation in achieving sustainable healthcare delivery? This session unpacks the promise and the challenges of AI in heart rhythm care, from wearable devices that flag arrhythmias in real time to decision-support algorithms that guide risk assessment and personalized therapy. Participants will discuss common pitfalls (including bias, data privacy, and workflow integration) and explore practical ways to harness AI tools for patient care, device management, and interprofessional collaboration. Whether you’re a nurse, technician, pharmacist, or physician assistant, you’ll gain the knowledge and confidence to critically evaluate new technologies, optimize patient outcomes, and become a champion for responsible innovation in your clinical setting.

The HRX 2026 Pitch Competition provides cardiovascular startups with a platform to present their innovative products, services, and solutions to a distinguished panel of judges and potential investors and win cash prices. The top five teams selected will compete on the HRX Main Stage. Each team will have ~5-10 minutes to creatively pitch their innovative idea, followed by five minutes to field questions from judges and attendees.

Arrhythmia care is often a necessity—but not all patients have equal access to cutting-edge treatments, timely diagnoses, or educational resources. In this interactive session, allied professionals will explore the barriers faced by underserved communities—including rural, low-income, and minority populations—in accessing effective heart rhythm care. We will discuss the role of the allied professional in leveraging telehealth, mobile clinics, wearable technology, community education, and culturally sensitive care models.

Cardiac genetics offers a compelling test case for digitally enabled precision medicine—where the convergence of genomics and continuous data has the potential to fundamentally reshape how risk is understood, monitored, and managed. This session will explore these themes as well as the potential for interventional therapies that can fundamentally change outcomes.

Rebecca Seidel, Senior Vice President and President of Cardiac Ablation Solutions at Medtronic, joins Dr. Suneet Mittal for a dynamic main tent conversation focused on what it takes to scale innovation in one of the fastest-growing sectors in MedTech. With more than two decades of leadership experience and oversight of a billion-dollar global business, Rebecca has led major acquisitions, accelerated innovation pipelines, and driven the commercialization of transformative cardiac technologies.

Together, Rebecca and Dr. Mittal will explore how organizations can successfully bridge the gap between breakthrough concepts and real-world clinical impact. The discussion will examine the strategic decisions behind building and integrating innovation, navigating market disruption, fostering high-performing teams, and shaping the future of cardiac ablation technologies. Attendees will gain insight into leadership at scale, the evolving competitive landscape in electrophysiology, and how industry leaders are positioning the next generation of therapies to improve outcomes for patients worldwide.

Catheter-based treatment of cardiac arrhythmias and Left Atrial Appendage Occlusion has seen tremendous advances in the past decade, lastly with a stronger trend toward integrated concomitant procedures. With evolving clinical needs and interventional workflows, the community continues to aim at improved efficacy, efficiency and safety for patients and staff, ultimately leading to the best treatment across complex patient populations. For Intraprocedural guidance as a cornerstone enabling understanding and navigating within the human anatomy, main modalities of choice today are Electro anatomical Mapping (EAM) and Intracardiac Echocardiography (ICE) for ablation, as well as Fluoroscopy and Transesophageal Echocardiography (TEE) for Left Atrial Appendage Occlusion. With a continued trend toward fully anatomically guided ablation approaches with modern PFA ablation systems, as well as concomitant treatment of LAAC, this session aims to discuss strategies and innovative technologies to enable individual and combined workflows through interventional cardiac image guidance using ICE. A specific focus here is to review where today’s workflows are challenged using different guidance solutions as well as the trend toward more integrated and combined procedures, and the need for reliable, intuitive, and precise navigation as a key requirement for optimal treatment.

This discussion explores how socially assistive robotics (“social robotica”) can enhance patient education by delivering consistent, personalized, and engaging coaching at the bedside, in clinics, and at home. We’ll review current use cases (e.g., medication adherence, rehab support, patient information, risk factor and lifestyle modification, chronic disease self-management), what the evidence says about patient outcomes and equity, and how robots can integrate with care teams and digital health tools. Participants will discuss practical design and implementation considerations—workflow fit, accessibility, privacy, trust, and safety—and leave with a framework for evaluating where social robots add real value in integrated care.

Robotic navigation, AI-assisted mapping, and automated lesion delivery are redefining procedural EP. This forward-looking session examines the feasibility, safety, and workflow transformation of semi-autonomous and autonomous EP labs.

The HRX 2026 Pitch Competition provides cardiovascular startups with a platform to present their innovative products, services, and solutions to a distinguished panel of judges and potential investors and win cash prices. The top ten teams selected will compete on the HRX Main Stage. Each team will have ~5-10 minutes to creatively pitch their innovative idea, followed by five minutes to field questions from judges and attendees.

We aren’t just changing the tool; we are changing the physics of the procedure. By moving to programmable platforms, we give the electrophysiologist the ‘knobs’ to tune therapy in real-time, moving EP from a practiced art to a precise science.

Few electrophysiologists have shaped the field as deeply or as repeatedly as Professor Michel Haïssaguerre. Best known for the seminal discovery that pulmonary vein triggers initiate atrial fibrillation, a finding that transformed AF from a largely medical disease into an ablation target, his contribution extends far beyond a single landmark observation.

Across his career, Professor Haïssaguerre has been at the forefront of the ideas, techniques and technologies that now define daily electrophysiology practice. His work helped establish curative catheter ablation for AVNRT and AVRT, advanced the mechanistic understanding and ablation of ventricular fibrillation, and the recognition of early repolarisation syndromes. He has also been closely linked to the development and clinical adoption of tools that changed how electrophysiologists see and treat arrhythmias, including circular pulmonary vein mapping, and multipolar mapping technologies such as the PentaRay catheter. More recently focused on non-invasive mapping to improve our understanding of arrhythmia mechanisms.
In this main tent conversation, Professor Haïssaguerre joins Professor Prashanthan Sanders to reflect on a career defined by clinical observation, scientific courage and technological innovation. The discussion will trace how disruptive ideas move from the laboratory and catheterisation laboratory into global standards of care: from the early days of supraventricular tachycardia ablation, through the pulmonary vein discovery in AF, to ventricular fibrillation mapping, inherited arrhythmia syndromes, and the next frontiers in ablation science.

This session offers attendees a rare opportunity to hear from one of the defining innovators of modern electrophysiology, not only about the discoveries that changed the field, but about the mindset required to make them.