Guerrero and his team are also exploring whether the term “digital twin,” which was first coined for manufacturing, is still the most apt term for copying something as intricate and dynamic as a living brain or heart. But the technology is still pretty new and needs some refining. If successful, the team plans to extend their technology to study other aspects of the brain, such as those involved in multiple sclerosis, stroke rehabilitation, depression, and the effects of psychedelics. But the Neurotwin team says that, if done right, this digital twinning could dramatically improve both patient outcomes and what we know about tricky-to-treat brain disorders. “To me, these are really important challenges we have to face now,” he says. In 2016, Bill Ruh, then-CEO of GE Digital, predicted that “we will have a digital twin at birth, and it will take data off of the sensors everybody is running, and that digital twin will predict things for us about disease and cancer and other things.” A digital twin could inform tailored treatments for a patient and predict how their disease might develop. “We are creating fairly sophisticated computational models of the brain,” Ruffini says.
The twin will include a network of embedded “neural mass models,” says Ruffini. “We are working to really help people suffering from brain diseases from a completely different perspective,” says Maiques. “We know what happens if you just say, ‘Well, just develop a technology-and then we’ll see,’” he adds, warning of the dangers that come with pushing ethical and moral consequences off to a later date. In the case of epilepsy, some areas of the connectome could become overexcited; in the case of, say, stroke, the connectome might be altered. It helps accommodate groups in the park, provides additional programming space, and helps support recreational trails, fishing and boating, birdwatching, play areas and non-motorized park access. “But, on the other hand, it provides us with challenges,” he continues. On the one hand, virtual body doubles provide us with exciting, revolutionary pathways to develop new treatments, says Matthias Braun, an ethicist at the University of Erlangen-Nürnberg, Germany, who has written about the ethics involved in the use of digital twins in health care.
Once the twin has been created, the team can use it to optimize stimulation of the real patient’s brain “because we can run endless simulations on the computer until we find what we need,” Ruffini says. They’re planning a clinical trial that will kick off next year and create digital twins of about 60 patients with Alzheimer’s, who will receive a brain stimulation treatment that has been optimized specifically for their brain. The Neurotwin team is hoping the model can be used to predict the effects of stimulation for the treatment of neurological disorders, including epilepsy and Alzheimer’s disease. Neurotwin, an EU-funded project, wants to design a computerized model of an individual patient’s entire brain. “Classic mn design starts by thinking long-term. To make a digital double for a patient with epilepsy, the Neurotwin team takes about half an hour’s worth of MRI data and about 10 minutes of EEG (electroencephalography) readings and uses these to create a computer model that captures the electrical activity of the brain, as well as to realistically simulate the brain’s main tissues, including the scalp, skull, cerebrospinal fluid, and gray and white matter.
The digital avatar is essentially a mathematical model running on a computer, says Giulio Ruffini, coordinator of the Neurotwin project and chief science officer and cofounder of Neuroelectrics, a Spanish health tech startup that is developing noninvasive therapies for neurological disorders like epilepsy. Ana Maiques, the CEO of Neuroelectrics, says the company is already grappling with the issue of what happens to the extremely personal data a digital twin is built upon. Braun says it’s time to reckon with these thorny questions. This means any use of the data requires the consent of its owner, Guerrero says. Could its use lead to misunderstandings or raised expectations within society? Along the way, I’ll focus on the use of simulation and expert advice to augment learning. Few Saleens were built exactly the same way, which made prices highly variable, but 1985-86 Saleen models started the $17,000-$20,000 range for coupes, $25,000 for a ’88 Saleen convertible. These, he says, are basically computational models of the average behavior of many neurons connected to each other using the patient’s “connectome”-a map of the neural connections in the brain. This is where a virtual brain could prove useful. Now researchers are shooting for the loftiest goal: to twin the brain.