""Many people get put on something because it showed a statistically significant though slight benefit in a few thousand diverse people in a big placebo-controlled trial," said Arnold, principal investigator at the Alzheimer's Clinical & Translational Research Unit at Massachusetts General Hospital and a professor of neurology at Harvard Medical School. "They then just stay on it forever, because we think maybe it is slowing the decline more than the placebo.""
""A digital twin is a virtual model of a person, or a part of a person, that doctors can use to test treatment decisions, like an engineer might stress-test a simulated building against digital earthquakes. Fueled by increasingly rich health data from wearables, medical records, and large national cohorts, and powered by novel statistical methods and artificial intelligence, the once-speculative technology is moving closer to a reality.""
Clinicians often decide treatment based on average results from large trials, leaving uncertainty about individual patient benefit. Neurologists seek methods to determine whether a therapy helps a specific Alzheimer's patient or predict benefit before prescribing. Digital twins create virtual models of individuals or biological subsystems to simulate treatment responses. Increasingly comprehensive data from wearables, electronic health records, and national cohorts, combined with new statistical techniques and artificial intelligence, enable these simulations. Digital twins can model cells, whole patients, or synthetic demographic cohorts. Researchers at Harvard are developing multiple scales and applications, including chatbots that mimic participant speech patterns for behavioral interventions.
Read at Harvard Gazette
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