There is more competition than ever. Find out the different funding options available and what investors are looking to invest in.Which place does your company rank in the AI adoption curve for AI? To find out, take our AI survey.Digital twins are being adopted by the health care industry to enhance personalized medicine, improve performance of health care organizations, and to develop new medicines and devices. While simulations have been around for a while, medical digital twins are a new approach. These digital twins can build useful models using information from wearable devices and omics. They connect dots between processes that include patients, doctors and health care organizations as well as drug or device manufacturers.Although it is still in its early stages, the field of digital twins is growing rapidly thanks to advances in machine learning, real-time data feeds and AR/VR. Digital twins have the potential to revolutionize how we diagnose and treat patients and provide incentives for health improvement. Proponents compare the current state of digital-twins to the 20-year-old human genome project. It may take a similar large scale effort to make it fully realized. Recent research by a group of Swedish researchers concluded that digital twins have the potential to solve a major medical problem. This should be reflected in concerted research on a similar scale as the HGP.Although such a project is not yet possible, there are several indicators that digital twins in medicine are gaining momentum. Here are 21 ways that digital twins are shaping health care today. These include personalized medicine, improved health care organizations, drug and medical device development, and improving healthcare. Many types of digital twins can be used in multiple ways and even across different categories. This is what makes digital twins so strong.Personalized medicineThe potential of digital twins is immense. They can make it easier to tailor medical treatment to individual patients based on their genetic makeup, anatomy, behavior, or other factors. Researchers are now asking the medical community for help in scaling up digital twins to scale from one-off projects to mass personalization platforms comparable to today's advanced customer data platforms.1. 1.Virtual hearts are being developed by several vendors. They can be tailored to each patient and can also be updated to track the evolution of disease or the response to new drugs, treatments or surgical procedures. Philip HeartModel creates a virtual heart using the company's ultrasound equipment. Siemens Healthineers is currently working on a digital heart twin to improve drug treatment and allow for cardiac catheter interventions. European startup FEops has already been granted regulatory approval and the FEops Heartguide platform was commercialized. The FEops Heartguide platform combines an AI-enabled analysis with a replica of the patient's heart to aid in the diagnosis and treatment of structural heart disease.Dassault's Living Heart Project was launched in 2014 by crowdsourcing a virtual twin of the human hearts. This project is an open-source collaboration between medical researchers, surgeons and medical device manufacturers as well as drug companies. The company's Living Brain project guides epilepsy treatment, and tracks the progression of neurodegenerative disorders. Similar efforts have been made for the eyes, knees and eyes as well as other systems.VentureBeat's Steve Levine, senior director of virtual human modelling at Dassault, stated that this is the missing scientific foundation to digital health. It can power technologies like AI and VR and ushers in a new era. He said that this could have a greater impact on society then what we've seen in telecommunications.2. 2. Genomic medicineResearchers in Sweden have used RNA from mice to create a digital twin that can predict the effects of different doses and types of arthritis drugs. This RNA-based method is being used to personalize treatment and diagnosis for patients. Researchers found that medications fail to work between 40% and 70% of the times. Similar methods are used to map the characteristics of human T cells, which play an important role in immune defense. These maps can be used to diagnose common diseases sooner and more effectively, which is often cheaper and easier.3. Personalized health informationDigital health services are now more popular than ever, allowing people to assess and treat simple conditions with AI. Babylon Healths Healthcheck App, for example, captures data and creates digital twins. It can be used to automatically capture data from fitness devices, wearables, and other devices such as the Apple Watch, as well as manually entered data like health histories, mood tracks, symptom trackers, and mood trackers. The digital twin can help to guide priorities and interact with doctors to treat more serious or persistent conditions.4. 4.The Empa research centre in Switzerland is currently working on digital twins that optimize drug dosages for chronic pain sufferers. The digital twin can be customized based on lifestyle and age to predict the effects of pain medication. Digital twin accuracy can also be calibrated by patient reports on the effectiveness of different dosages.5. 5.While most digital twins use existing equipment to capture data, Q Bio's Gemini Digital Twin platform begins with a complete body scan. The company claims it can capture a whole body scan in just 15 minutes, without radiation or breath hold. It uses advanced computational physics models that are better than traditional MRIs for many diagnoses. Andreessen Horowitz, Kaiser Foundation Hospitals and other companies have given the company over $80 million. Q Bio is working on integrations that will improve these models by incorporating data from genetics and chemistry as well as lifestyle and medical history.6. 6.The Dassaults digital twins have been used by a Boston hospital to help improve surgical procedure planning and evaluate the results. They can also create the shape of a cuff that connects the heart and the arteries using the digital twins.Sim&Cures Sim&Size allows brain surgeons to simulate aneurysms in order to increase patient safety. Aneurysms can be caused by clots and strokes. Digital twins are able to improve planning and execution of less invasive surgeries using catheters to place unique implants. Ansys' embedded simulation software allows for customized simulations based on data from patients. The need for follow up surgery has been dramatically reduced by preliminary results.Improved health care organizationsThe potential for digital twins to improve the delivery of care in health care is also promising. Gartner invented the term "digital twin of the organization" to describe the process of modeling the operations of an organization in order to improve the underlying processes.This can be done in most industries by using process mining to find variations in business processes. These techniques can be complemented by new tools that are specific to health care.7. Improve caregiver experienceThe digital twins can be used to help caregivers find and capture information that is shared between doctors and specialists. John Snow Labs CTO David Talby stated, "We are generating more data than ever and nobody has the time to sort it all." Digital twins can also help caregivers capture and find information shared across physicians and multiple specialists. Patients may see the same specialist twice, and they might be asked the same repetitive questions.Digital twins can be used to model the patient, and then use NLP technologies to analyze all data and to cut through the noise to sum up what's happening. This allows providers to save time and presents information in a more accurate way.8. EfficiencyThe GE Healthcare Command Center is a major initiative that virtualizes hospitals and tests the effects of different decisions on organizational performance. Modules are used to evaluate changes in operational strategy and capacities, staffing, care delivery models, and staffing to objectively decide which actions to take. They have created modules that can be used to calculate the effect of bed configurations on care, optimize surgical schedules and improve facility design. Managers can test different ideas without the need to conduct pilots. GE stated that this platform is already being used by dozens of organizations.9. Shrinking is a critical treatment windowSiemens Healthineers is working with the Medical University of South Carolina in order to improve the hospital's daily routine. This includes workflow analysis, system redesign and process improvement methods. They are trying to speed up the treatment of stroke patients. This is crucial because early treatment is vital, but it requires coordination of many processes in order to function smoothly.10. 10.Many countries are exploring incentive models to improve the alignment of new treatments, interventions and drugs with their outcomes due to rising costs in health care. One popular approach is value-based healthcare. Participants, much like drug companies, will only receive compensation proportional to the impact they have on outcomes. This will require new relationships between multiple stakeholders in the health delivery system. The enabling infrastructure to organize the details of these arrangements could be provided by digital twins.11. Resilience in the supply chainThe pandemic demonstrated how fragile modern supply chains can be. Due to restrictions and shutdowns from China, health care organizations faced shortages in essential personal protection equipment. Health care organizations can use digital twins to model their supply chains and better plan for new events, shutdowns or shortages. This can help with negotiations and planning, such as in the recent pandemic. A recent Accenture survey revealed that 87% of executives in health care believe digital twins are essential for their ability to collaborate on strategic ecosystem partnerships.12. Construction of hospitals fasterThe construction of medical facilities that need to adapt quickly to rapid changes such as those experienced by the pandemic could be streamlined using digital twins. Atlas Construction created a digital twin platform that helps organize all details of health care construction. Paul Teschner, founder of Atlas Construction, saw how difficult it was to build new facilities in remote parts of the globe. This inspired the project long before the pandemic. It organizes design, procurement, construction, and other processes. It is built upon the Oracle Cloud platform and Primavera Uniifier asset lifecycle management services.13. Streamlining calls center interactionsCustomer service agents can communicate more easily with their patients using digital twins. A large insurance company used TigerGraph graph databases to combine data from more than 200 sources to create a complete longitudinal health history for every member. Andrew Anderson, a TigerGraph industry leader in health care, stated that this level of detail gives a clear picture about the members' current and past medical situations.TigerGraph claims that a holistic view of all claims prescriptions, refills and follow-up visits reduced call handling time by 10%. This resulted in an estimated $100 million in savings. The Net Promoter Score has been increased and churn reduced by shorter, more relevant conversations between agents and members.Development of medical devices and drugsDigital twins are a powerful tool for improving the design, development and testing of new drugs and medical devices. A significant U.S. FDA program has been launched to encourage the adoption of different digital approaches. European and American regulators are working together to identify frameworks that allow simulation and modeling to be included in approvals of new drugs and devices.14. Software-as a-medical deviceThe FDA has created the regulatory framework that will allow companies to sell and certify software-as a-medical device. The idea behind the creation of a patient-specific digital twin is to use data from multiple sources including ultrasounds, genetic tests, lab tests and imaging devices. Digital twins can be used to optimize medical devices like pacemakers, automated insulin pumps, or novel brain treatments.15. 15.To assess the risks associated with various drugs, pharmaceutical researchers have been using digital twins. This could improve the drug safety of individual drugs or drug combinations at a lower cost than manual testing. The basic model has been developed for 23 drugs. This model could be extended to reduce the $2.5 billion needed to develop, test, approve, launch and launch new drugs.16. Simulating new production linesSiemens collaborated with many vaccine manufacturers to develop and test different vaccine production lines. New mRNA vaccines can be fragile so they must be carefully combined with microfluidic production line configurations that combine nanoscale-sized particles. They were able to validate and scale the manufacturing processes and speed up its launch from 1 to 5 months using digital twins.17. Increase device uptimePhilips launched a predictive maintenance program which combines data from more than 15,000 medical imaging devices. The company hopes that digital twins will improve uptime and allow engineers to customize equipment for different customers' needs. It also hopes to apply the same principles to all its medical equipment.18. 18.Device makers are being urged by regulators to ensure that their equipment is monitored after sales as part of post-market surveillance. Either expensive staffing is required to maintain the equipment, or the equipment must be equipped with digital twins capabilities. PTC's CTO Steve Dertien explained that Sysmex partnered with PTC to include performance testing in its blood analyzer, which resulted in a waiver from the new requirements. VentureBeat also heard that Sysmex negotiated with PTC. This allowed for smaller clinical settings that are closer to patients. It can speed up diagnosis.19. Simulating human variabilityAtlases and skeletons often depict the perfect person. Real-life people often have minor differences in their bones and muscles that go unnoticed. Medical device manufacturers struggle to understand how anatomical differences among individuals may impact the performance and fit of their equipment. Virtonomy has created a list of common variations in order to assist medical equipment manufacturers in conducting studies about how these variations might affect the performance and safety new devices. They simulate the characteristics of common variations within a population, rather than individual differences.20 20.Modern drug development often involves testing thousands to millions of potential drugs in highly controlled environments. These facilities can be automated with a digital twin. It can help prioritize tests in response of discoveries. Digital twins can also increase the reproducibility of experiments among labs and between lab personnel. Artificial recently received $21.5 million in series-A funding from Microsoft and other investors to develop software for lab automation. They believe that their unified data platforms and models will help them rise to the top of the $10 billion market for lab automation software.21. 21.Oklahoma State researchers have been working together with Ansys in developing a digital twin that will improve drug delivery by using models of simulated lungs. This is part of the Virtual Human System project. They discovered that only 20% of the drugs they wanted reached their target. They were able to modify the drug's composition and particle size to increase delivery efficiency up to 90% using digital twins.
