An IMEC led consortium is developing CARDIS, a mobile, low-cost, non-invasive, cardiovascular disease screening device, with the goal of mass screening. Current detection methods, including chest X-ray, ECG, Holter monitoring and cardiac MRI, often detect CVD at a later stage due to cost or complexity of use.
CARDIS is based on Doppler vibrometry (LDV) – a non-contact technique that directs a laser at a moving surface, and uses the Doppler shift of reflected light to infer vibration amplitude and frequency.
In this screening method, LDV detects vibrations of locations on the skin close to arteries or on the chest. Several CVD screening parameters, including arterial stiffness, are obtained. (A stiffer artery leads to a higher pulse wave velocity, typically measured by the time it takes a pulse wave to travel between two locations on an artery. ) LDV can operate without physical contact and with higher accuracy, and can also sense stenosis induced vibrations and cardiac contraction abnormalities.