I may be a twin but I'm one of a kind!

Digital Twin

The Metaverse itself acts as a digital twin to our universe and our reality. Inside it we’ll find more and more digital twins representing tangible things that will eventually be used for transactions and the optimization of business processes.

Before explaining how the healthcare industry and pharma companies can use “digital twins” in the Metaverse, let's understand first what digital twin is and its use cases in other industries.

The purpose of a digital twin is to imitate real-time information concerning an individual or an abject behavior, considering their unique context and structure. The digital twin aims to accumulate data throughout the physical twin’s life cycle and extracts valuable insights about the individual or the object. 

Digital Twins (DT’s) are being used to examine objects or environments with the intent to perfect their functioning and to extrapolate the solutions in the real world.

The technology enables the creation of a digital twin is based on an artificial intelligence (AI) consists with a comprehensive data collection regarding the person or the object’s performance by a variety of sensors attached to them. The substantial advantage of the system concerns its ability to use machine learning techniques aim to evaluate real-time performance and run “what if” simulations that can be reported back to the individual or the object automatically. This enables experimentation with large objects or projects that don’t typically lend themselves to real-life experimentation due to their size – such as buildings, jet engines or manufacturing sites.

According to the current forecast, in the next five years the global market of digital twin is expected to reach $63.5 billion, with soaring market growth of 41.7% CAGR.

Digital twins find their application in various end-use industries like manufacturing, aviation, agriculture, energy and utilities, automotive industries, and HEALTHCRE!

The global market for digital twins in the manufacturing industry alone is expected to reach more than $6 billion. That’s more than a tenfold increase from 2020, according to data from Statista.

Why Digital Twin?

Digital twin combines real-world data and virtual model analyses that might prevent real problems, reduce production interruption, cost, and even make plans for future activities through simulation. Furthermore, with digital twin researchers and engineers can access real-time data, simulation results and solutions, so they can efficiently perform hundreds of operational tasks in a long distance.

A constant and continuous "copy" is sustained by using smart sensors to detect the attributes, parameters, changes etc. of the physical entity and its surroundings that need to be transported to the digital model secretly in time.

Deriving its information from the real entity, the model behaves just like the real entity since it is modelled in terms of its real parts, working principles, and mechanisms.

Besides behaving as its real parts (simulation), the AI model can validate, optimize, evaluate, diagnose the real part, give suggestions, show predictions and so on. The whole system constitutes a feedback loop or a circle so people can use it to make decisions and gain control over the real part if necessary.

Physical component, virtual component, and data management platform of a general digital twin (DT) framework. Processes | Free Full-Text | Digital Twins in Pharmaceutical and Biopharmaceutical Manufacturing: A Literature Review | HTML (mdpi.com)

Digital Twins in Healthcare 

There are many indicators that digital twins are gaining traction in healthcare and in particularly in Pharma.

Here are some ways digital twins are starting to shape healthcare TODATE.

Virtual organs: Every heart is unique.

Cardiovascular diseases (CVDs) take the lives of 17.7 million people every year – almost one third of all deaths worldwide. Early detection and prediction of the progression of CVD are essential for saving lives through improved treatment. However, despite significant advances in medical imaging techniques like MRI, CT and Ultrasound, determining optimal treatment plans for patients with CVD remains challenging.

Its no so easy to reconstruct and interpret the anatomy of a patient’s heart from a set of 2D images. Yet this is a crucial step in understanding the nature of a CVD and in planning and guiding interventions. This limits the usefulness of general, fixed anatomical models that are based on average population data. Unlike traditional anatomical models which describe organs in a general way, a digital twin reflects a particular organ– it captures the idiosyncrasies that makes our heart unique enhancing the precision.

Planning surgery- when every millimeter counts.

Another interesting Digital Twin application in the field of healthcare is to improve surgical procedure planning and assess the outcomes afterward. The digital twins also help to generate the shape of a cuff between the heart and arteries.

Driving efficiency and learnings with digital twins’ hospitals

The GE Healthcare Command Center is a major initiative to virtualize hospitals and tests the impact of various decisions on changes in overall organizational performance. Involved are modules for evaluating changes in operational strategy, capacities, staffing, and care delivery models to objectively determine how to act. For instance, modules can estimate the impact of bed configurations on care levels, optimize surgical schedules, improve facility design, and optimize staff levels with no need for pilot programs. 

Shrinking critical treatment window

Another use case of Digital twins in hospitals is to improve the hospital’s daily routine through workflow analysis, system redesign, and process improvement methodologies. For example, DT’s can help to treat stroke patients faster. This is important since early treatment is critical but requires the coordination of several processes to perform smoothly that can be done by the technology of the digital twin.

Faster hospital construction

Digital twins could also help streamline construction of medical facilities keeping up with rapid changes, such as were seen since the outbreak of the pandemic.

As Atlas Construction developed a digital twin platform to organizing all the details necessary for healthcare construction. Specifically, the platform helps to develop a design, a procurement, and different construction processes.

To sum up 

The digital twin and the metaverse are the next big step in our technological evolution as these two technologies continue to minimize the gap between the physical and the digital world. The integration of digital twin technology has a huge potential optimizing healthcare by allowing better prediction, monitoring, tracking, allocation, resource management, optimization, and quality control. Additionally, combining this technology with the implementation of other technologies like XR (mixed reality), and blockchain can offer even a broader change to the healthcare industry.

In my next chapter, I will focus on how pharma companies adopting both technologies, DTs and Metaverse towards a more connected future and a unified virtual and physical world.

Yigal.