Digital twins in healthcare: A new era for healthcare delivery

• Digital twin technology uses millions of data points to create virtual replicas of physical entities
• While still in relative infancy, the application of digital twins in healthcare holds great potential to improve disease treatment and prevention
• Facilitating real-time dynamic modeling of biochemical pathways, cells, tissues, and diseases, digital twins can help deliver highly personalized medicine to patients

While the term may conjure up images from a horror film or a dystopian thriller, the use of digital twins in healthcare is actually a positive and exciting new frontier in healthcare delivery.

From enhancing personalized medicine to improving surgical planning, digital twins come in all shapes and sizes, enabling healthcare players to simulate, predict, and monitor health with unprecedented accuracy.¹

Healthcare Transformers takes a closer look at the use of digital twins in healthcare, outlining both how and why their use is helping to improve the delivery of healthcare to patients.

In simple terms, a digital twin is a highly detailed virtual replica of a physical entity. But in real terms, digital twin research technology is a lot more complicated than that.²

Within the context of healthcare, digital twin technology can create virtual models of everything from entire populations to specific organs, like the human heart.² Its use allows healthcare professionals to create virtual copies of a body or organ of interest, enabling them to carry out further research or assist with patient diagnoses.^2,3

Digital twin technology applies what is known as biophysiological data models to create a simulation.³ The models use specialist algorithms and millions of data points to allow the creation of digital replicas of physical objects — for example, a patient’s body, which provides a dynamic, bi-directional link between both the physical entity and its digital counterpart.^3,4 This enables real-time, dynamic modeling of biochemical pathways, cells, tissues, diseases, and ultimately, the entire human body, giving  personalized medicine an even deeper meaning, and creating a new, “tantalizing reality.”⁴

Being able to create a digital version of a patient can open up a lot of possibilities, especially in terms of researching and implementing specific treatment plans. By having a medical twin available, healthcare professionals can test treatments and make clinical decisions before performing them on the real-life patient.⁴

The advantages that come with the use of digital twins look set to provide the healthcare industry with: 

• Enhanced personalized medicine opportunities: Modeling the biochemical pathways within the human body allows for highly personalized treatment plans. Through simulations, healthcare professionals can assess how different therapies will impact individual patients based on their unique biological profiles and data.^1,3 

• Improved surgical planning: Digital twin technology allows surgeons to create virtual models of specific conditions, such as brain tumors. When combined with the use of artificial intelligence (AI), the entire surgical procedure can be simulated, enabling surgeons to plan the operation by assessing different entry points, angles, and depths.⁴

• Real-time monitoring and earlier diagnostics: Having a virtual model of a patient enables continuous health monitoring of an individual.³ This facilitates faster identification and diagnosis of any potential issues, with timely interventions put in place sooner rather than later.

• More cost-effective research opportunities: The progression of virtual healthcare technologies like digital twins is making it easier to test new drugs and treatments while significantly reducing the time and costs typically associated with clinical trials.⁵

• Increased patient engagement: Digital twin technology creates a virtual clone of a patient’s body, which can be used to help patients not only better understand how their own bodies work, but also help them to make more informed decisions.⁴

• Optimized chronic disease management: Once a digital twin has been created, the data points used to design it are continuously updated to assess how treatments are working. Not only that, but since digital twins can simulate the progression of chronic diseases like diabetes and heart disease, they can also recommend opportunities for improved management.⁴

• Improved predictive analytics and bioinformatics: When coupled with the use of AI in predictive analytics models, digital twin technology allows healthcare professionals to foresee potential health issues before they arise and put the correct treatment plans in place.⁶

Before digital twin technology can really take off, various challenges still need to be overcome, including regulatory compliance and the reduction of implementation costs.¹  Admittedly, digital twin technology is still in its relative infancy, but the potential benefits it can provide are unprecedented. Its emergence is also continually growing in momentum.  

In time — and with correct integration into the healthcare, IT, and AI sectors — it has the potential to revolutionize the industry and change the future of personalized medicine, offering predictive interventions, remote monitoring, and opportunities for medical research.⁵  It’s an area of technology certainly worth keeping a close eye on over the coming months and years — whether that be your own eye or a digitally-created alternative.