Digital twins help treat heart and metabolic diseases

Three recent initiatives, in the UK, France and India, are dedicated to creating new ways of improving treatments for heart and metabolic diseases.

In the UK, an interdisciplinary team of researchers from Imperial College London will create and test cardiac models using digital twin technology on a group of chronically ill patients. The aim is to see if it is possible to improve monitoring processes and, ultimately, healthcare.

The £8 million CVD-Net project will include the development of accurate virtual copies of participants’ hearts from medical records, hospital scans and information from wearable and implanted monitors. The data will also be continuously updated in real time.

The expectation is that the digital twin hearts will make it possible to more accurately track changes in the progression of each patient’s disease and responses to treatment, as well as making it possible to make personalised predictions.

The interdisciplinary team of engineers, doctors and computer statisticians will work together to create the necessary digital infrastructure and will also be close to the patients to assess the usability and accuracy of the solution.

‘We want to use digital twin technology to better predict patients’ condition, the chance of them developing a health problem or whether the medication will work. We hope that this will allow us to be more receptive and responsive and thus reassure patients,’ explains Steven Niederer, chair of Biomedical Engineering at the National Heart and Lung Institute at Imperial College London and co-director of Digital Twins at the Alan Turing Institute.

The researchers believe they are the first to research and test the use of digital twin technology in the UK healthcare system (NHS) with a real group of patients and on a reasonable scale.

All the patients taking part in the study have pulmonary arterial hypertension, a potentially fatal cardiovascular disease that causes severe shortness of breath, heart failure and recurrent hospitalisation.

In France

The French start-up PrediSurge, founded in 2017, specialises in the use of digital twin technologies for interventions such as the treatment of vascular and structural heart disease.

Traditionally, cardiovascular surgeries are based on CT scan images. Using PrediSurge’s PlanOpTM platform, it is possible to use images from the preoperative phase to create patient-specific numerical models that simulate the biomechanical behaviour of arteries and valves.

These digital twins give doctors improved tools for planning and optimising surgical procedures, allowing them to test specific approaches in a virtual environment. This improves the effectiveness of interventions and reduces the risk of complications.

For the whole body

In India, Twin Health has created the Whole Body Digital Twin service to reverse, improve and prevent chronic metabolic diseases. A dysfunctional metabolism occurs when factors such as nutrition, sleep patterns, physical conditioning and stress alter vital chemical processes in the body. This leads to negative effects on the body’s system that can result in chronic metabolic diseases and organ damage.

Whole Body Digital Twin produces a digital twin of each individual, a dynamic metabolism model developed from thousands of data points collected daily via wearable sensors, clinical laboratory parameters and self-reported preferences. The digital twin is also powered by Artificial Intelligence resources.

‘An essential component of our technology is the personalised, data-driven recommendations and reminders delivered by the app. This proactive approach encourages day-to-day patient engagement and adherence to proposed treatment plans,’ says Paramesh Shamanna, Twin Health’s medical director, in an interview with the Freethink website.

A randomised clinical trial published by Twin Health in September 2023, carried out with digital twins of 232 diabetes patients, reported that at the end of one year of treatment around 73% of patients using Twin Health’s technology were in remission from type 2 diabetes.

Market on the rise

The global market for digital twins in healthcare exceeded US$1.6 billion in 2023 and is expected to reach US$38.4 billion by 2032, according to a study published by Towards Healthcare.

In particular, there has been a growing importance of digital twins in cardiovascular treatments to help provide more accurate diagnoses in a significant patient universe. According to a report by the World Heart Federation, cardiovascular diseases have affected more than 500 million people worldwide, leading to 20.5 million deaths in 2021.