Challenges of Moving Beyond Digital Twins to Digital Patients

Abstract

The past decade has seen a rapidly expanding body of literature on the development and use of digital twins in medicine. Since 2020 around 3000 articles have been published that broadly address various topics related to digital twins, including their use in medicine. This paper focuses on the major challenges that come into play when considering the development of digital twins that seek to replicate an individual human and changes in health over time. Integrating the numerous medical digital twins that are currently being developed into a functional Digital Patient involves creating a detailed digital representation of a person that can simulate their behavior, health status and ranking on a variety of social determinants of health. The major challenges in the development of a multi-scale, interoperable, verifiable Digital Patient are highlighted in this paper. The overall challenge is to integrate the thousands of digital twins developed in the past few years into a usable Digital Patient. Issues that must be addressed include data collection, data integration and analysis, modeling and simulation, artificial intelligence (AI), visualization, clinical applications, security, and tools that facilitate development of usable simulated digital twins.

Keywords: Digital twins, medical modeling, simulation, interoperability

DOI: 10.54941/ahfe1007269