The ‘Digital Twin’ to enable the vision of precision cardiology
European Heart Journal

Abstract
Providing therapies tailored to each patient is the vision of precision medicine, enabled by the increasing ability to capture extensive data about individual patients. In this position paper, we argue that the second enabling pillar towards this vision is the increasing power of computers and algorithms to learn, reason, and build the ‘digital twin’ of a patient. Computational models are boosting the capacity to draw diagnosis and prognosis, and future treatments will be tailored not only to current health status and data, but also to an accurate projection of the pathways to restore health by model predictions. The early steps of the digital twin in the area of cardiovascular medicine are reviewed in this article, together with a discussion of the challenges and opportunities ahead. We emphasize the synergies between mechanistic and statistical models in accelerating cardiovascular research and enabling the vision of precision medicine.
Contributors

Jorge Corral-Acero
Author

Francesca Margara
Author

Maciej Marciniak
Author

Cristobal Rodero
Author

Filip Loncaric
Author

Yingjing Feng
Author

Joao F Fernandes
Author

Hassaan A Bukhari
Author

Ali Wajdan
Author

Manuel Villegas Martinez
Author

Mariana Sousa Santos
Author

Mehrdad Shamohammdi
Author

Hongxing Luo
Author

Philip Westphal
Author

Paul Leeson
Author

Paolo DiAchille
Author

Viatcheslav Gurev
Author

Manuel Mayr
Author
National Heart and Lung Institute Imperial College London , United Kingdom of Great Britain & Northern Ireland

Pras Pathmanathan
Author

Tina Morrison
Author

Richard Cornelussen
Author

Frits Prinzen
Author

Tammo Delhaas
Author

Ada Doltra
Author

Marta Sitges
Author

Edward J Vigmond
Author

Ernesto Zacur
Author

Vicente Grau
Author

Blanca Rodriguez
Author

Espen W Remme
Author

Steven Niederer
Author
Imperial College London London , United Kingdom of Great Britain & Northern Ireland

Peter Mortier
Author

Kristin McLeod
Author

Mark Potse
Author

Esther Pueyo
Author

Alfonso Bueno-Orovio
Author
University of Oxford Oxford , United Kingdom of Great Britain & Northern Ireland

Pablo Lamata
Author
King's College London London , United Kingdom of Great Britain & Northern Ireland

