Medical digital twins: enabling precision medicine and medical artificial intelligence

The notion of medical digital twins is gaining popularity both within the scientific community and among the general public; however, much of the recent enthusiasm has occurred in the absence of a consensus on their fundamental make-up. Digital twins originate in the field of engineering, in which a constantly updating virtual copy enables analysis, simulation, and prediction of a real-world object or process. In this Health Policy paper, we evaluate this concept in the context of medicine and outline five key components of the medical digital twin: the patient, data connection, patient-in-silico, interface, and twin synchronisation. We consider how various enabling technologies in multimodal data, artificial…

• NI
  National Institutes of Health
• NC
  National Cancer Institute