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Digital twins of human organs are here. They’re set to transform medical treatment.

MIT Technology Review
by Jessica Hamzelou
Dec 19, 2024 at 5:09 AM

A healthy heart beats at a steady rate, between 60 and 100 times a minute. That’s not the case for all of us, I’m reminded, as I look inside a cardboard box containing around 20 plastic hearts—each a replica of a real human one.

The hearts, which previously sat on a shelf in a lab in West London, were generated from MRI and CT scans of people being treated for heart conditions at Hammersmith Hospital next door. Steven Niederer, a biomedical engineer at the Alan Turing Institute and Imperial College London, created them on a 3D printer in his office.

One of the hearts, printed in red recycled plastic, looks as I imagine a heart to look. It just about fits in my hand, and the chambers have the same dimensions as the ones you might see in a textbook. Perhaps it helps that it’s red.

The others look enormous to me. One in particular, printed in black plastic, seems more than twice the size of the red one. As I find out later, the person who had the heart it was modeled on suffered from heart failure.

The plastic organs are just for educational purposes. Niederer is more interested in creating detailed replicas of people’s hearts using computers. These “digital twins” are the same size and shape as the real thing. They work in the same way. But they exist only virtually. Scientists can do virtual surgery on these virtual hearts, figuring out the best course of action for a patient’s condition.

After decades of research, models like these are now entering clinical trials and starting to be used for patient care. Virtual replicas of many other organs are also being developed. Engineers are working on digital twins of people’s brains, guts, livers, nervous systems, and more. They’re creating virtual replicas of people’s faces, which could be used to try out surgeries or analyze facial features, and testing drugs on digital cancers. The eventual goal is to create digital versions of our bodies—computer copies that could help researchers and doctors figure out our risk of developing various diseases and determine which treatments might work best. They’d be our own personal guinea pigs for testing out medicines before we subject our real bodies to them.
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#2

These digital twins could eventually become important in diagnosis and treatment when gross anatomy is crucial, such as heart functioning.

Without a detailed metabolic component, the twins seem very limited. I doubt that we are close to being able to simulate detailed metabolism in real time or even averages over time periods. Metabolism is complicated and individualized. We lack a lot of basic metabolic research and how do analyze individual variations.