Our Founder and CTO Prof. Marco Evangelos Biancolini recently held a lecture on ‘Digital Twins & Medicine 4.0’ as a guest of the seminar ‘Polymeric heart valve replacements’ organized by the University of Sydney, Australia.

Biancolini, Associate Professor of Machine Design at Università Tor Vergata in Rome, Italy, explored the theme of the medical digital twin through four examples relating to ongoing European projects: the case of aneurysms (MeDiTATe project), the case of spine surgery (Spinner project), the case of mBTS shunting (FF4EuroHPC project) and the case of drug delivery (FF4EuroHPC project).

In the last decades, medical engineering has led to the consolidation of the in silico approach which, together with in vivo and in vitro investigation methods, is providing very accurate answers to phenomena that are difficult to measure. Fluid dynamics simulation of cardiovascular systems, structural simulation of prosthesis and tissue stresses, and fluid dynamics simulation of the respiratory system are well-established examples.

In silico evaluations have multiple advantages: based on the images already acquired of the patient, they allow for a much higher spatial resolution than that which can be obtained from the images. The patient’s digital twin aims to make the in silico approach usable in practice. In many cases, numerical simulation requires supercalculation (HPC). The accuracy of the in silico method depends a lot on the excellence of the image segmentations and AI is leading to very effective solutions.

Here you can watch the lecture: Digital Twins & Medicine 4.0 or you can download our presentaion here.