Predicting Heart Health with a “Digital Twin” Heart Model

In a paper published today in European Heart Journal, researchers from King’s College London show how linking computer and statistical models can improve clinical decisions relating to the heart. By integrating the two models, researchers were able to create a computerized version of our heart that represents human phyisiology and individual data. The team calls this model the “Digital Twin.”

“The Digital Twin will shift treatment selection from being based on the state of the patient today to optimising the state of the patient tomorrow,” the researchers wrote in the paper.

This could mean that a trip to the doctor’s office could be a more digital experience. “The idea is that the electronic health record will be growing into a more detailed description of what we could call a digital avatar, a digital representation of how the heart is working,” says senior author Pablo Lamata.

Mechanistic models see researchers applying the laws of math and physics to simulate how the heart will behave. Statistical models require researchers to look at past data to see how the heart will behave in similar conditions and infer how it will do it over time. Models can pinpoint the most valuable piece of diagnostic data and can also reliably infer biomarkers that cannot be directly measured or that require invasive procedures.

“We already extract numbers from the medical images and signals, but we can also combine them through a model to infer something that we don’t see in the data, like the stiffness of the heart,” Lamata says. “We obviously cannot touch a beating heart to know the stiffness, but we can give these models with the rules and laws of the material properties to infer that importance piece of diagnostic and prognostic information. The stiffness of the heart becomes another key biomarker that will tell us how the health of the heart is coping with disease.”

The researchers believe that the power of computational models in cardiovascular medicine could also provide us with more control over our daily heart health. Given the popularity of wearable monitoring devices, a wearable digital twin of our hearts could inform us about its current health as well as any potential risk factors.