Health informatics design for assisted diagnosis of subclinical atherosclerosis, structural, and functional arterial age calculus and patient-specific cardiovascular risk evaluation.

Traditional methods used to assess cardiovascular risk (i.e., the Framingham Risk Score) exhibit clear limitations. To aid in patient-specific risk stratification and diagnosis it has been proposed to evaluate noninvasively structural and functional arterial parameters. A National Public University Center (CUiiDARTE) was created in Uruguay with the aim of developing and applying strategies to improve cardiovascular risk stratification and subclinical vascular disease detection. To this end a health informatics approach and tool was designed, developed, and implemented in CUiiDARTE. Its goals were to: 1) promote screening for subclinical atherosclerosis, 2) develop a centralized database to store information obtained noninvasively from anywhere in our country, 3) develop a biomathematical model integrating values for arterial structure and function into traditional cardiovascular risk assessment, 4) generate a detailed and comprehensive report for the specialist comparing patient data with reference data from the healthy population, 5) generate a similar report (using a structural and functional arterial age calculator) for the patients assessing the state of their arteries. In this paper, we present the main characteristics of the CUiiDARTE health informatics development.