This article might be of interest to folks on here who are interested in the concept of digital twins. It includes an interview with Amanda Randles, a researcher focused on modeling blood flow and predicting the impact of interventions.
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It’s the right path but I fear we are far from the end. I’ll be watching and letting others be the first to trust the computer. But if circumstances force hard choices on me then I’ll be happy to have a second or third “expert” opinion
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For me the interview highlighted just how incredibly challenging it is to model such a complex system as a human body. Getting one component (e.g. blood flow) into a useful model is one thing, but attempting to bring together many components to get a more global sense of impacts of any given intervention beyond the system it most directly impacts is clearly some years into the future.
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A real “digital twin” that you could test interventions on, would be tremendous but this article is only a primitive first step dealing with circulation. It would need to include all the organs. Any movement towards personalized, individual medicine is important and just as the mapping of the human genome and using genetics to understand individual health risks was a big step forward, I think that a digital twin would explain why an intervention works in one person but not another.
I was thinking this too… that a true “digital twin” is many decades away (having to model every protein interaction in people’s body, every organ, brain, etc… will it ever be done?), but after looking at this article I think I can see the value in mini-digital twins of smaller systems and portions of aspects of our bodies. Perhaps genotype could be mapped to drug databases so we can identify which drugs are better suited for our specific alleles, etc.
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