Digital twins come to the life sciences

The railway bridge along a busy London to Scotland route near the English village of Norton Bridge might look like nothing special.But buried within the concrete and steel structure are fiber-optic cables that track movement with enough precision to weigh passing trains.The data feed a digital copy of the bridge stored on the computers of researchers at the University of Cambridge and the Turing Institute in London ( 1 ).In real time, the virtual bridge incorporates the wear and strain placed on the physical structure-invaluable information to monitor its performance, plan maintenance, and potential safety issues.The virtual bridge is an example of the growing applications of digital twins, which are adjustable computer models of specific physical objects from the real world.Digital twins have long been used to analyze everything from cities to power plants to cars.Every vehicle sold by Tesla has a digital twin, which collects and analyzes data to determine whether the vehicle is working as intended or if it needs maintenance.As sensor and imaging technologies improve, along with ways to collect, transfer, and analyze vast quantities of data, the use of digital twins is expanding to the biosciences, from the medical field to the cornfield."They've been predominantly used in the physical sciences," says Michael Waight, a cardiology research fellow at St George's University of London."But now we're appreciating what their potential uses could be for healthcare and medical science."Just as engineers can check on the condition of a bridge or car, medics and researchers aim to track the health of the heart and other organs to help predict Medics and researchers are using digital twins to track the health of the heart and other organs in hopes of predicting outcomes and guiding treatments.Image credits: