HTIC of IIT Madras develops affordable, easy to use technology for vascular screening

Chennai: Healthcare Technology Innovation Centre (HTIC) of IIT Madras has developed “ARTSENS”, an affordable vascular screening technology that measures stiffness of blood vessel walls.

The technology was developed with the goal of addressing the unmet need of performing large scale vascular health screening that can prevent premature vascular events at a younger age. HTIC is a joint initiative of IIT Madras and Department of Biotechnology, Ministry of Science and Technology, with the objective of developing technologies for unmet healthcare needs in the country.

Cardiovascular diseases (CVD) are the number one cause of death globally, causing nearly 17.3 million deaths in 2008, with the number expected to increase to 23.3 million by 2030. Nearly 10pc of Indian population suffer from CVDs. India has seen a significant shift in disease burden from communicable to non-communicable diseases (NCD), over the last couple of decades, with CVD accounting for half of all deaths from NCDs.

Several factors such as age, diabetes, lifestyle etc progressively affect the blood vessels, ultimately resulting in an acute vascular event affecting the heart or brain. Loss of elasticity of blood vessel walls, referred to as arterial stiffening, is a marker of endothelial dysfunction, indicative of vascular health and can be used in early detection and screening. Early detection of abnormalities in arterial stiffness can be used to triage subjects for further investigation and intervention. Interventions at this early stage in people with poor vascular health can prevent premature vascular events with significant decrease in morbidity and mortality.

Conventional equipment available for evaluation of arterial stiffness are expensive, laborious, time consuming, and require skilled expertise to operate, and hence not suited for large scale population level screening.

Dr Jayaraj Joseph, Systems Architect of HTIC who led the project explained, “ARTSENS is an image-free technology that non-invasively measures the stiffness of the carotid artery in an automated manner. The technology uses a single ultrasound sensor that the operator places over the carotid artery, on the neck of the subject, to get a reading of artery stiffness within a minute.”

Intelligent computing algorithms assist the operator in positioning the probe and automatically perform artery detection, motion tracking and stiffness calculations, allowing the device to be operated with minimal expertise. The technology was developed and validated in close collaboration with leading clinicians in the city.

A prototype of ARTSENS was tested at MediScan Systems, Chennai on 106 subjects in comparison with ultrasound imagers and demonstrated measurement accuracy and usability in clinical setting. “With this technology, both the cost of device and time taken for doing a test comes down and thus the cost per test can drop down to nearly 100 fold”, says Dr S. Suresh, Director, MediScan Systems. 

A validation study of ARTSENS was conducted at Thambiran Heart and Vascular Institute, Chennai on 125 subjects. Carotid artery stiffness measurements by ARTSENS demonstrated excellent correlation with state-of-art echo tracking ultrasound system, illustrating ability of the device to accurately measure carotid stiffness.“It can be used as a portable, effective, quick screening tool for assessing vascular health in population at large”, says Dr R Ravikumar, Head of Thambiran institute. He added that population level data of arterial stiffness along with affordable, easy-to-use devices based on ARTSENS would enable wide spread use of vascular screening for early detection.