Overview and Digital Twins

The overall goal of our group is to develop, test, and apply medical digital twins. Our medical digital twins are computer copies of a person. In other words, just like a normal monozygotic twin, your medical digital twin looks like you, on the outside, and has a similar physiology on the inside. We have built up these medical digital twins, by modeling all of the main organs in the human body. These models are primarily mechanistic models, which describes the processes happening inside the organs, and inside the cells. We have also developed an approach to integrate all of these organ models into an interconnected whole-body model. In other words, our models are multi-level, ranging from the whole-body level to the intracellular molecular level. Our digital twins are also multi-timescale, because they can simulate processes from the range of ms (e.g. action potentials in neurons) to years (e.g. disease progression). Finally, our digital twins are personalized, i.e. we use person-specific data to continuously update the digital twins to a specific person, as he/she is at a given time. These digital twins can be used for a variety of purposes, e.g. in medicine, drug development, education, entertainment, defense, etc, and we are pursuing all of these applications, to various extent.

If you want, you can read more about the different aspects of how we develop, test, and make use of our digital twins in various additional pages below.