All of the sudden, the digital twin is here. It's not a perennial topic in science fiction, it's not something that has ever been posted here, at least not until the past year. And it's one of those things that doesn't seem like a big deal; in fact, we're not even sure what it's for. (It has been around since the 1970's though, used to understand NASA spaceships).
The one thing it is -- it's easy to understand. You make a digital version of yourself, modeled in a computer, living in a simulation, if you will, and constantly updated with real-time data, so that we can run experiments on it ---instead of running the experiments on you---.
If you're a cancer patient, with all the bits and pieces that make you who you are, and we want to know if our cancer treatment will work in concert or against all those bits and pieces of yourself, we could always just give you the treatment and see what happens, right? Isn't there a better way? Yes, now there is.
And one day, sometime between when you get a much better result from your cancer treatment and when the entire human race has been uploaded to low earth orbit satellite router networks, we will watch as these twins, or doubles, or avatars (or self-replicates) become more important than the bodies they serve.
Unrelated image credit: Oort Cloud Pablo Carlos Budassi via Wikimedia
Creating 'digital twins' at scale to improve drone deliveries
Jun 2021, phys.org
A delivery drone suffers some minor wing damage on its flight. Should it land immediately, carry on as usual, or reroute to a new destination? A digital twin, a computer model of the drone that has been flying the same route and now experiences the same damage in its virtual world, can help make the call.Kapteyn and colleagues sought out a unifying mathematical representation of the relationship between a digital twin and its associated physical asset that was not specific to a particular application or use. The researchers' model mathematically defines a pair of physical and digital dynamic systems, coupled together via two-way data streams as they evolve over time."I think this idea of maintaining a persistent set of computational models that are constantly being updated and evolved alongside a physical asset over its entire life cycle is really the essence of digital twins," says Kapteyn.
via Massachusetts Institute of Technology: Michael G. Kapteyn et al, A probabilistic graphical model foundation for enabling predictive digital twins at scale, Nature Computational Science (2021). DOI: 10.1038/s43588-021-00069-0
Tumor avatars' predict patients' response to immunotherapy
Jul 2021, phys.org
This is just a simple explanation of how digital twin technology works in medicine:
"We first cut patient tumor samples into small pieces and then treat these 'tumor avatars' outside the patient's body with different therapies, to see which one works."
via Netherlands Cancer Institute: An ex vivo tumor fragment platform to dissect response to PD-1 blockade in cancer, Nature Medicine (2021). DOI: 10.1038/s41591-021-01398-3
Digital twins for cancer patients could be 'paradigm shift' for predictive oncology
Dec 2021, phys.org
We've also been hearing this term used in reference to NFTs, in the context that you will soon need to establish a digital deed for yourself, before someone else does it for you, if you know what I'm saying.
But back to the story at hand:
Cancer Patient Digital Twins (CDPTs) would reflect a patient's molecular, physiological and lifestyle characteristics as they evolve over time and across different treatments, and help "usher in a new age in medicine" by increasing the probability of optimal care, the authors concluded.It would address changes across timescales from the molecular level to the population level, and as the patient's disease state evolves, the digital twin would incorporate real-time observational data to predict future states.Researchers envision clinicians will use CPDTs to perform virtual experiments, simulating the patient's disease trajectory under different treatments. At each visit with a clinician, the predictions would be compared with real-life measurements to assess the digital twin's performance and update it in a "continuous learning" loop to inform patient decision making.
via Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory: Tina Hernandez-Boussard et al, Digital twins for predictive oncology will be a paradigm shift for precision cancer care, Nature Medicine (2021). DOI: 10.1038/s41591-021-01558-5
Post Script:
Who owns "digitaltwin.com" you ask?
General Electric - Digital Twin Creation - GE builds highly complex physical assets essential to critical infrastructure including energy production and distribution, air and locomotive transport, and healthcare. A Digital Twin is developed and informed by a massive amount of design, manufacture, inspection, repair, online sensor and operational data and employs a collection of high-fidelity computational physics-based models and advanced analytics to forecast the health and performance of the asset over its lifetime. The accuracy of the Digital Twin’s representation grows over time as more data refines the model and similar assets are deployed with their own Digital Twins. Data are gathered continually to maintain an up-to-date model. The Digital Twin provides detailed knowledge of the asset, forecasts based on “what if” scenarios and a live reference from which to build applications to optimize services, performance, efficiency, maintenance, supply chain, business operations and more.Contact Us To Build Your Digital Twin
Notes:
Polish singer claims to be the first in the world to sell off digitalised parts of her BODY as NFTs with her 'rarest parts' including 'G-spot, nipples and lips' starting at £73,000. Daily Mail. Sep 2021. [link]
The Anomaly, by Hervé Le Tellier (2021) is a virtuoso novel where logic confronts magic, a witty variation on the doppelgänger theme. It's not about the concept of digital twins, but I thought it might fit here regardless. [goodreads link]
Digital Body Brokers and Future Futures (aka The Intergalactic Bodynet), 2021
Full Steam Ahead (aka the Kufizoid, the Kufi-probe), 2021
Anthromimetic Cosmogenesis (aka the Virtual Facebook World), 2021
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