Background: Accurate and fast material characterization is critical for (computational) modeling of arterial tissue mechanics both at health and disease [1]; however, remains challenging due to the tissue’s structural anisotropy and heterogeneity. The “Virtual Fields Method (VFM)” offers a computationally effective approach for such complex materials [2], yet found very limited application on arterial tissue characterization so far. Method: We have developed two VFM frameworks to characterize healthy and diseased (i.e., atherosclerotic) arterial wall mechanical behavior. While the homogeneous anisotropic mechanical properties of the healthy arterial wall were obtained by a VFM framework utilizing full-field surface displacement data from uniaxial tensile tests, the artery-specific heterogeneous properties of atherosclerotic arteries were obtained by another VFM framework that uses ultrasound-derived volumetric deformation data from inflation tests. The performance of VFM frameworks were evaluated against synthetically-generated data. Results: The developed VFM frameworks predicted the anisotropic material parameters and the fibre orientation of the healthy wall, and the heterogenous properties of the atherosclerotic wall with errors below 6%. Both frameworks required <10 seconds on a standard PC to obtain the results. Conclusions: Our study demonstrates the usefulness of VFM-based frameworks to characterize the arterial wall mechanical behavior at health and disease. The computational efficiency even suggests potential use for artery-specific assessment in the clinic. REFERENCES [1] Akyildiz, A et al., Biomed Eng Online, 10:25, 2011. [2] Pierron&Grediac, Springer,”Virtual fields method”, 2012.