Sahal Radhya, Alsamhi Saeed H, Brown Kenneth N
School of Computer Science and Information Technology, University College Cork, T12 E8YV Cork, Ireland.
Insight Centre for Data Analytics, National University of Ireland, N37 W089 Galway, Ireland.
Sensors (Basel). 2022 Aug 8;22(15):5918. doi: 10.3390/s22155918.
Digital twins (DTs) play a vital role in revolutionising the healthcare industry, leading to more personalised, intelligent, and proactive healthcare. With the evolution of personalised healthcare, there is a significant need to represent a virtual replica for individuals to provide the right type of care in the right way and at the right time. Therefore, in this paper, we surveyed the concept of a personal digital twin (PDT) as an enhanced version of the DT with actionable insight capabilities. In particular, PDT can bring value to patients by enabling more accurate decision making and proper treatment selection and optimisation. Then, we explored the progression of PDT as a revolutionary technology in healthcare research and industry. However, although several research works have been performed for smart healthcare using DT, PDT is still at an early stage. Consequently, we believe that this work can be a step towards smart personalised healthcare industry by guiding the design of industrial personalised healthcare systems. Accordingly, we introduced a reference framework that empowers smart personalised healthcare using PDTs by bringing together existing advanced technologies (i.e., DT, blockchain, and AI). Then, we described some selected use cases, including the mitigation of COVID-19 contagion, COVID-19 survivor follow-up care, personalised COVID-19 medicine, personalised osteoporosis prevention, personalised cancer survivor follow-up care, and personalised nutrition. Finally, we identified further challenges to pave the PDT paradigm toward the smart personalised healthcare industry.
数字孪生（DTs）在彻底改变医疗行业方面发挥着至关重要的作用，带来更个性化、智能化和主动式的医疗保健。随着个性化医疗的发展，迫切需要为个人创建虚拟复制品，以便在正确的时间以正确的方式提供合适的医疗服务。因此，在本文中，我们研究了个人数字孪生（PDT）的概念，它是具有可操作洞察能力的DT的增强版本。特别是，PDT可以通过实现更准确的决策以及正确的治疗选择和优化，为患者带来价值。然后，我们探讨了PDT作为医疗保健研究和行业中的一项革命性技术的发展历程。然而，尽管已经针对使用DT的智能医疗开展了多项研究工作，但PDT仍处于早期阶段。因此，我们认为这项工作可以通过指导工业个性化医疗系统的设计，朝着智能个性化医疗行业迈出一步。相应地，我们引入了一个参考框架，通过整合现有先进技术（即DT、区块链和人工智能）来利用PDT实现智能个性化医疗。然后，我们描述了一些选定的用例，包括减轻新冠病毒传播、新冠病毒康复者后续护理、个性化新冠病毒药物、个性化骨质疏松症预防、个性化癌症康复者后续护理以及个性化营养。最后，我们确定了进一步的挑战，以推动PDT范式朝着智能个性化医疗行业发展。
