top of page

Why?

Cardiovascular disease (CVD) is the leading cause of mortality and morbidity worldwide. The main component of CVD is ischemic heart disease (IHD), accounting for approximately half of all CVD deaths. Accurate, personalized risk assessment and personalized treatment recommendations are important to address the heterogeneous population at risk of CVD. The current standard of care uses algorithms to estimate CVD and IHD risk which only integrate a small number of traditional risk factors. However, as cardiovascular events still abundantly occur in individuals deemed low risk, research is ongoing into further optimizing preventative strategies.

How?

A new advance in the era of personalized medicine is the concept of a digital twin to personalize prognosis and treatment. A health digital twin receives input from several data sources and aids in decision-making and prognosticating for individual patients. To do so, medical data are required to build a clinical phenotype, based on electronic health record data from various sources, including imaging, genetic, clinical, and any other biological data. Data can be enriched by real-time recordings collected by sensors, mobile phones, or other wearable devices. Clinically relevant insights are delivered through an iterative process of data pre-processing and integration. In a digital twin, mechanistic (knowledge of physiology, physics, and chemistry) and statistical (knowledge derived from data) models are combined to enable reasoning within the twin. For a real-world patient, a (set of) digital twin(s) that has the closest resemblance to the index patient is selected or derived from a population databank. From the identified digital twin, future events and risks can be extracted. The results of possible interventions are then presented to the patient.

What?

We aim to apply the concept of a digital twin to patients with CVD in the Netherlands. In recent years, the Dutch government has spearheaded an initiative to centralize an individual's health data in a digital personal health environment (PHE). In a PHE, all medical records pertaining to an individual are stored in a centralized, cloud-based environment, as opposed to the standard of care where each care facility has their own set of digital records in a sealed-off system. Patients are then able to provide healthcare providers access to their PHE health data. An additional functionality for patients is to add data to the PHE, such as wearable data or symptom severity. Adoption of a PHE is rising steadily, with more than 30.000 unique users in the first nine months of 2022. This provides a unique opportunity to develop a digital twin, as well as to test its real-world applicability.

bottom of page