Manufacturing technology
The digital twin comes of age
From product design to patient-specific clinical decision support, digital twins are rapidly reshaping how medical devices are developed and deployed. Claire Read speaks to Dr Adelaide de Vecchi, head of the Department of Digital Twins for Healthcare at King’s College London; Dr Steven Niederer, National Heart and Lung Institute chair of biomedical engineering at Imperial College London; and Medtronic’s Jeff Bodner about the growing role of digital twins in healthcare and medical devices.
A
delaide de Vecchi knows that to work in digital twins is to work in an area for which “there are a lot of different definitions floating around”. While digital twins is a term that is increasingly used – The Economist described digital twins as “fast becoming part of everyday life” – it can mean different things to different people, including those considering the concept in healthcare settings. That’s an area in which Dr de Vecchi specialises. A senior lecturer at King’s College London, she serves as head of its research department for digital twins in healthcare. And she stresses that while different people mean different things by the term, there are a few core elements that remain true across all definitions of digital twins.
“I like to think of a digital twin as a digital replica
of a real-world system, and in healthcare that could be a replica of a device that gets implanted in a patient, or it could be an organ in a patient, or a system of organs. It could also be a clinical pathway,” she says. But what matters in defining something as a digital twin is not so much what is being replicated, but how the model reacts to data. “There’s the idea of continuous updates, so the idea that data constantly updates the twin. There’s also the idea that it’s a bidirectional relationship – so data flows from the real world into the twin, but also flows the other way round.”
For medical device manufacturers, it’s an approach with multiple possible uses. One is creating a digital twin of an actual product. “So you create a digital replica of, for example, a heart valve or stent,”
44 44
www.medicaldevice-developments.com
www.medicaldevice-developments.com
Ole.CNX/
Shutterstock.com
Page 1 |
Page 2 |
Page 3 |
Page 4 |
Page 5 |
Page 6 |
Page 7 |
Page 8 |
Page 9 |
Page 10 |
Page 11 |
Page 12 |
Page 13 |
Page 14 |
Page 15 |
Page 16 |
Page 17 |
Page 18 |
Page 19 |
Page 20 |
Page 21 |
Page 22 |
Page 23 |
Page 24 |
Page 25 |
Page 26 |
Page 27 |
Page 28 |
Page 29 |
Page 30 |
Page 31 |
Page 32 |
Page 33 |
Page 34 |
Page 35 |
Page 36 |
Page 37 |
Page 38 |
Page 39 |
Page 40 |
Page 41 |
Page 42 |
Page 43 |
Page 44 |
Page 45 |
Page 46 |
Page 47 |
Page 48 |
Page 49 |
Page 50 |
Page 51 |
Page 52 |
Page 53 |
Page 54 |
Page 55 |
Page 56 |
Page 57 |
Page 58 |
Page 59 |
Page 60 |
Page 61 |
Page 62 |
Page 63 |
Page 64 |
Page 65 |
Page 66 |
Page 67 |
Page 68 |
Page 69 |
Page 70 |
Page 71 |
Page 72 |
Page 73 |
Page 74 |
Page 75 |
Page 76 |
Page 77 |
Page 78 |
Page 79 |
Page 80 |
Page 81 |
Page 82 |
Page 83 |
Page 84 |
Page 85 |
Page 86 |
Page 87 |
Page 88 |
Page 89 |
Page 90 |
Page 91 |
Page 92 |
Page 93 |
Page 94 |
Page 95 |
Page 96 |
Page 97 |
Page 98 |
Page 99 |
Page 100
