A virtual twintoguard brain health

When we hear the word 'twins', we tend to think of two identical people who share physical traits, and perhaps certain behaviours or quirks. However, in the world of technology, this word has a different meaning. It refers to something both revolutionary and still relatively underexplored: digital twins.

- JON ANDONI DUÑABEITIA

A digital twin is a virtual replica of a real system, a dynamic model that, fed by real-time data, mimics the behaviour of what it represents. It is like having a smart mirror that not only reflects something's state, but also learns from each movement it makes in order to predict the next.

Digital twins have been used in various sectors for years. They help us to predict aircraft faults before they occur, to optimise entire factories, and to design cars that learn from thousands of users’ driving data. More recently, this technology is being applied in agriculture, leading to significant advances in, for instance, predicting the impacts of climatic and natural changes on crops.

In medicine, digital twins are a game-changer. There are, for instance, approaches based on cardiac digital twins that simulate the functioning of each patient’s heart with a remarkable level of detail. This will allow doctors to anticipate how a specific heart will respond to an arrhythmia or a specific treatment, all without ever putting the actual patient at risk.

This combination of virtual modelling and clinical data opens the door to more predictive, personalised, and safer medicine, where therapeutic decisions are based not only on medical experience, but also on simulations of what will happen in a patient’s digital twin. But what happens if we apply this to the human brain?