Today, we kick off our 6th annual Living Heart Symposium. This virtual event focuses on inventing new ways of representing life, specifically by creating the virtual twin of the human body.
We just completed a paper on this same topic, which we today unveil in coordination with the symposium. We invite you to download this paper, Virtual Twin of Humans: The Next Horizon in Healthcare.
The paper explores a transformative level of healthcare that we’re on the cusp of achieving: patient-centric digital health. Bringing this vision to life requires creating a digital medical system with a detailed view of each patient’s anatomy, biology and life exposure. This system must capture the vast amounts of data generated about each individual and connect that with knowledge from researchers and clinicians from around the globe. The system must also be available to a patient’s entire care team. The unifying vision behind this is a virtual twin: an integrative reference of personal health information.
The virtual twin is created with software that conforms to known scientific principles. It functions as a dynamic model, consistently fed by and improved with real-world data, medical history and environmental exposures. Because the 3D reconstruction is of a complete human body including all systems, genetic code and fundamental biomarkers, the virtual twin can enable new understandings and approaches to health diagnosis, prognosis, treatments and anticipation of future conditions. And as understanding of human biology, physiology, biomechanics and pharmacology improves, these virtual twins will become more precise, predictable and usable.
Dassault Systèmes is proud to be at the forefront of helping to bring the vision of precision medicine to reality. Our decades-long support of helping manufacturing industries use virtual twins to innovative non-organic products can now be replicated to transform the organic world. You’ll discover in the paper examples of how we’re doing this today, including our proven work (the topic of today’s symposium!) on the heart, along with projects on virtual twins of the brain, cells, gut and microbiota.