Digital Twins for More Precise and Personalized Treatment

Abstract

The use of Digital Twins (DTs) or the digital replicas of physical entities has provided benefits to several industry sectors, most notably manufacturing. To date, the application of DTs in the healthcare sector has been minimal, however. But, as pressure increases for more precise and personalized treatments, it behooves us to investigate the potential for DTs in the healthcare context. As a proof-of-concept demonstration prior to working with real patients, we attempt in this paper, to explore the potential for creating and using DTs. We do this in a synthetic environment at this stage, making use of data that is all computer-generated. DTs of synthetic present patients are created making use of data of synthetic past patients. In the real world, the clinical objective for creating such DTs of real patients would be to enable enhanced real-time clinical decision support to enable more precise and personalized care. The objective of the numerical experiment reported in this paper, is to envisage the possibilities and challenges of such an approach. We attempt to better understand the strengths and weaknesses of applying DTs in the healthcare context to support more precise and personalized treatments.