Eman Namati is the former President and CEO of SpectraWAVE, an AI-enabled intravascular imaging and physiology company acquired by Philips, where he now serves as Head of Advanced Imaging within Image Guided Therapy. He previously spent a decade at NinePoint Medical, rising from principal scientist to CEO. Before that, he was a scientist conducting imaging and biomedical engineering research at Massachusetts General Hospital and the University of Iowa. Eman holds a PhD in Medical Imaging and Biomedical Engineering from Flinders University, Australia, and completed his postdoctoral research at Harvard Medical School in Boston.

In January 2026, Philips completed its acquisition of SpectraWAVE, the company Eman spent almost six years building as its CEO. This might read as an exit story, but Eman insists SpectraWAVE was built with a mindset to operate independently: every decision, down to whether to manufacture in-house or outsource, was made with an eye toward owning the technology, the product, and its clinical relationships end to end. Positioning it this way, he argues, is what gave SpectraWAVE optionality when strategic acquirers came calling.

The company set out in 2017 to improve outcomes for the roughly 20 million American adults living with coronary artery disease, a condition responsible for 2.5 million diagnostic angiograms and 1 million percutaneous coronary interventions each year. Its HyperVue imaging system and X1-FFR software bring intravascular imaging and wire-free physiology onto one platform, allowing physicians to assess the severity of a blockage and then plan and optimize the revascularization. HyperVue combines near-infrared imaging with automated AI analysis to highlight key structures and composition, such as calcium and lipid, for both PCI optimization and identification of plaques at heightened risk of a future cardiac event.

Eman joined the startup as CEO in 2020, and by 2023, SpectraWAVE had secured FDA clearance for HyperVue, followed later that year by expanded AI imaging features, and then a 510(k) clearance for X1-FFR in 2025. Backed by a $50 million Series B in 2024 from investors including Johnson & Johnson, S3 Ventures, Lumira Ventures, SV Health, and Deerfield, Philips acquired the company in January of 2026 and folded HyperVue and X1-FFR alongside its existing Digital IVUS and wire-based OmniWire, giving the strategic a market-leading position across both intravascular imaging and physiologic assessment. Eman now leads Advanced Imaging within Philips Image Guided Therapy business.

Over a 25-year career spanning imaging research, product development, and commercialization, Eman went from scientist to CEO, first at NinePoint Medical and later at SpectraWAVE. He calls himself "a little bit more of a practical engineer scientist," and his transition from academia to industry reinforced an important lesson: innovation only creates meaningful impact when it successfully reaches patients. Building a product that genuinely meets a clinical unmet need and delights the customer, while creating a sustainable commercial business, is what actually produces a meaningful outcome. As he puts it, "commercial success is what ultimately leads to real impact." 

To meet this goal, a mindset shift needs to happen. A scientist can keep gathering data until a question is fully answered, but a CEO working toward a commercial deadline has to judge when the information on hand is enough to make a decisive decision. Commercial success also reshaped what’s considered good design: the best technical solution isn't always the best product, he says. If something is expensive to make, hard to manufacture, difficult to use, slow to build, or disruptive to a physician's workflow, it won’t be adopted. 

And because no single scientist can carry a product to market alone, the individual credit that drives academia — first author, sole principal investigator — should give way to building a team that spans far more disciplines than you’d find in any one lab.

Becoming a CEO means redefining how to achieve meaningful impact. Decisions get made on incomplete information, technical elegance gives way to cost, manufacturability, and workflow fit, and expertise has to be pooled across a multidisciplinary team. Innovation achieves its full impact when it reaches patients at scale.

Eman says the instinct to overbuild is common among technical founders. Part of it depends on the starting point: whether the product creates a new category or incrementally improves an existing workflow. Either way, his answer isn't a fixed MVP definition, but one that moves with company stage: minimum viable product looks different for a pre-clinical study, pivotal trial, or early commercial launch. The one constant is patient safety. 

To decide what's essential at each stage, Eman leans on trusted clinical collaborators to build for the broader target user, beyond just KOLs. That gives him what he calls his North Star: clarity on the product, so he can make trade-offs deliberately rather than by default. 

An early product needs to be differentiated, but it doesn’t need every bell and whistle or full ecosystem integration. If you design it so the team can later iterate on it, those advanced features can come later. As you scale up, trade-offs shift toward manufacturability, serviceability, and cost. 

And the sooner a team gets into pre-clinical testing, the better, because this is where gaps begin to surface that bench testing missed.

There's no single MVP, only the right one for your current stage. Patient safety is the one thing you can't compromise. Other priorities, from feature completeness and ecosystem integration to manufacturability, serviceability, and cost, should be optimized appropriately for each stage. Lean on a handful of trusted clinical collaborators who can guide what matters now versus what features to revisit later.

Regulatory clearance can be very different from the evidence needed to drive broad clinical adoption and commercial success. A 510(k) pathway, Eman explains, requires substantial equivalence to a predicate, and for imaging products the claims it produces tend to be light. "A clearance is by no means equivalent to the evidence required to drive adoption," he says. 

So the key question becomes what a company is actually solving for: evidence to enter the market and test against the right patient population, or evidence to change clinical behavior, which typically requires multi-year, multi-center studies. At his first company, the team accumulated nine clearances over a decade, spanning the initial product, additional features, and new indications, without producing a claim that significantly changed behavior. 

For a new category, he says the better path is refining the product in a lower-cost, non-commercial setting, leaning on clinical KOLs and strategists to define convincing evidence for the target clinical community, synchronized with reimbursement strategy from the start.

Achieving regulatory approval and winning the market are two separate campaigns. A lighter regulatory bar can leave a company technically approved but still unproven to the people who decide whether to use the product. Build the case for adoption as its own strategy, not as something clearance automatically produces.