Digital twins will help to tailor healthcare more in the future
Researchers Lukas Dekker and Carlijn Buck of TU/e and the Catharina Hospital are investigating how they can provide better-tailored care to heart patients through smart modeling, thanks to a digital twin of each patient.
Imagine you have a virtual copy of your own body. This digital twin, an accurate computer model, can help doctors better understand your health, personalize treatments, and intervene earlier to prevent more significant problems. What sounds like science fiction now is becoming more and more of a reality, and in the (distant) future, it could revolutionize healthcare.
A digital twin is actually a kind of digital version of yourself, based on data from your body, but also on information from many other people. This technology is already being used in sectors such as industry and urban planning, where these virtual copies can be used to predict how machines or traffic systems will behave, for example.
Now, this technique is also increasingly finding its way into healthcare.
What does this mean for the patient of the future?
Lukas Dekker, cardiologist-electrophysiologist at the Catharina Hospital and professor at Eindhoven University of Technology (TU/e), explains: “In the future, we will be able to provide tailor-made care with the help of a digital twin.”
“This means that we are better able to determine the best treatment for each patient, instead of giving everyone the same standard of care. This not only makes healthcare more personalized but also more efficient and affordable. We move away from the idea of one size fits all.”
(...)
Carlijn Buck, PhD candidate in cardiovascular biomechanics, is working on the development of digital twins of heart patients within the COMBAT-VT project. “It's still a long way off to make a complete digital copy of the body, but the first versions of digital twins of the heart have already been created,” she says. “The next step is for such a model to adapt as new data comes in, and then quickly predict whether something will go wrong.”
This means that doctors can predict your health better and better without you having to go to the hospital constantly. “In the future, more and more devices you wear – such as smart watches or heart monitors – will pass on data to your doctor.”
Read more about the digital twin on the website of TU Eindhoven