Building India’s Vascular Health Map

VESPA builds on over a decade of vascular health technology development and translational research at Indian Institute of Technology Madras (IIT Madras) and the Healthcare Technology Innovation Centre (HTIC), IIT Madras.

At its core is ARTSENS®, a patented image-free ultrasound technology that enables accessible and scalable assessment of vascular aging. The platform measures key vascular health markers such as arterial stiffness, aortic pulse wave velocity, central and brachial blood pressures, and vascular age using a portable, field-ready platform.

ARTSENS addresses the critical limitations of conventional vascular assessment systems, which are often costly, operator-dependent, and limited to specialist settings. It consolidates multiple vascular aging measurements into a single platform suitable for community and high-throughput research.

VESPA aims to understand vascular health at scale and in context. Each participant provides a standardized multimodal profile, creating a multidimensional dataset linking early vascular health markers with clinical, metabolic, and population factors.

VESPA is implemented across urban, rural, corporate, industrial, and academic populations to capture India’s demographic, occupational, and socioeconomic diversity.

A key scientific goal is to establish India-specific reference values and normograms for early vascular health markers. Vascular health varies by age, sex, ethnicity, geography, lifestyle, and cardiometabolic status, and reference values from other populations may not reflect India’s diversity.

The development and translation of the ARTSENS technology portfolio have received support at different stages from the HTIC, IIT Madras’s Institute of Eminence (IoE) Programme, IITM Pravartak Technologies Foundation, the Indian Council of Medical Research (ICMR) and its Medical Device and Diagnostics Mission Secretariat (MDMS), the Anusandhan National Research Foundation (ANRF), the Department of Biotechnology (DBT), Government of India, the Indo-U.S. Science and Technology Forum (IUSSTF), the Wadhwani Foundation, Prazim Trading & Investment Company, National Instruments, and multiple industry collaborators.

Building on this technology-development ecosystem, VESPA is now expanding into a large-scale national vascular-health programme with additional Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) support from Azim Premji and a growing network of clinical, academic, community, and industry partners.

VESPA welcomes research institutions, hospitals, public-health organisations, technology partners, community organisations, industry collaborators, and funders to participate in building India’s largest multimodal vascular-health database and advancing population-level cardiovascular prevention.