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Virtual You

How Building Your Digital Twin Will Revolutionize Medicine and Change Your Life

Peter Coveney and Roger Highfield

Princeton UP, 2023

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In the future, doctors may use “digital twins” – sophisticated computer simulations of your body – to provide personalized medical care. Your digital twin would react as you would to a drug or other treatment. It could also alert your doctor to health issues that might trouble you in the future. Professors Peter Coveney and Roger Highfield illuminate the history and future of biological simulations. Though they target a general audience, their citations of mathematics, biology and computer science make their book a challenging, stimulating read for laypeople.

Summary

The engineering concept of “digital twins” is an emergent medical tool.

Engineers have long used digital twin computer models to aid in the design of machinery and manufacturing processes. These simulations played a role in the design of everything from cars to spacecraft.

Now, people apply the concept to the biological processes of living organisms, including human beings. Scientists hope to go beyond simulating a generic human body to creating detailed simulations of individual patients. This “Virtual You” would model the functions of your body – from molecular interactions to the workings of your heart, lungs, bones and brain – and the infrastructure that binds them.

With Virtual You, doctors may personalize treatment to an unprecedented degree by using your digital twin to test the potential effects of drugs and other therapies. Similar to how meteorologists use computer modeling to forecast the weather, doctors may be able to offer “healthcasts” to predict and prevent a patient’s specific illnesses – rather than react to illnesses after they manifest. These healthcasts could describe your general health outlook on ...

About the Authors

The director of University College London’s Centre for Computational Science, Peter Coveney is also a professor at the Informatics Institute at the University of Amsterdam and an adjunct professor at the Yale School of Medicine. In 2023, Roger Highfield, the Science Director at the Science Museum Group, was named honorary president of the Association of British Science Writers.

Virtual You

How Building Your Digital Twin Will Revolutionize Medicine and Change Your Life

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The engineering concept of “digital twins” is an emergent medical tool.

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