Technology not only serves to keep the world connected, it also has important applications that can even help the user take care of their health. Within this field, one of the advances that has become more relevant in the last year has been the digital twin achieved, of course, thanks to artificial intelligence.
Is about exact virtual copies of a physical space or object, so it allows testing, for example, the resistance of materials or their behavior in certain situations. The most common use case is that of aeronautics that has been using these digital twins since 1989 thanks to the French company Dassault Systems.
Thanks to digital twins, airplanes entered their golden age. Innovation sped up as they could test more and new models without physically building them, iterating tens of thousands of times a year instead of just a few. In short, the goal of this technology is to improve product design, allowing thousands of engineers and mathematicians to work on a single virtual representation.
Now this company is focused on creating a personalized health platform for the year 2040. What would happen if that year the entire body of a patient had its digital twin? That is, a perfect reproduction that it was from the nervous system, to the bone or the digestive system, to give an example.
In principle, this would allow try some medication before prescribing it to the patient. Or, we could even simulate an operation and anticipate its success. Furthermore, if we apply artificial intelligence and data analysis to digital twins to predict the cardiotoxicity of drugs, it could help save time and resources in clinical trials. Something that would have come in handy especially in the development of vaccines against Covid.
Dassault Systèmes has already been working on simulating life with its digital twins, starting with the heart, bringing together multiple experts with one goal. These virtual hearts are allowing doctors perform surgeries first on the digital twin to ensure the best result for the patient, especially in high-risk operations, such as newborns.
Another of the uses that they are giving to virtual twins is to investigate the progression of neurodegenerative diseases such as Alzheimer’s, and to test the effects of different drugs, in order to speed up the time it takes to develop treatments for them. “There are many years left before we can reproduce the rest of the body, especially the brain, which remains a great unknown,” Steve Levine, founder of the project, explains to ABC.
Another of the great advances that digital twins will bring in the field of health will be in nutrition. We will be able to test the effect of any food on our body, and observe its long-term effect, being able to create hyper-personalized diets that would adjust to our digestive system.