ARTSENS® Mobile: a portable image-free platform for automated evaluation of vascular stiffness

Vascular stiffness is a key physiological marker significant in screening and early diagnosis of vascular disease. However, state of art techniques for vascular stiffness evaluation are not suited for field deployment. We present ARTSENS® Mobile, a portable, image-free ultrasound technology platform for automated evaluation of carotid artery stiffness, amenable for field deployment. The technology utilises a single element ultrasound transducer operated in pulse echo modality to investigate arterial wall dynamics, assisted by intelligent algorithms for wall identification and motion tracking to completely automate the measurement. The ARTSENS Mobile is built around the NI sbRIO 9651 embedded SOM which runs all algorithms for pulsed transducer excitation, high speed synchronised ultrasound echo capture, real-time signal processing and automated measurement. The system is designed to communicate wirelessly with any smart tablet for data display and wire-free control. The accuracy of automated arterial dimension measurements made by ARTSENS Mobile was verified by phantom studies using a reference ultrasound imaging system. The ability of the system to reliably perform automated measurements was verified by a systematic in-vivo study on 21 volunteers. The intra-operator and inter-operator variability of stiffness index β, was found to be good with a coefficient of variation (CoV) less than 12% and 16 % respectively. The ARTSENS® Mobile can provide accurate and repeatable measures of arterial stiffness in an easy manner and has strong potential in large scale vascular screening.