Ärzte können einen „digitalen Zwilling“ Ihrer Organe erstellen. Die Technologie könnte das Gesundheitswesen verändern.

Twice a week, scores of people gather at Boston Children’s Hospital to plan the most difficult cardiac surgeries. They analyze three-dimensional, digital copies of hearts projected on a screen, every damaged blood vessel or malformed ventricle a threat to the life or health of a child.

These duplicates can be rotated or taken apart piece by piece on the computer screen, allowing the surgeons to precisely plan an upcoming operation. With the help of biomedical engineers, the doctors can see the impact on other cardiac functions such as blood and oxygen flow, the heart’s electrical system and the pressure on valves. They can even gauge the impact of the patches or repairs they intend to use — all before the first incision is made.

Someday, sensors or wearables may be added to the technology, creating a pathway for the human heart to transmit data to any patient’s virtual heart. This feedback loop would create a digital twin, sometimes referred to as a virtual twin. This is the next step up from more traditional simulations and models, providing doctors with another way to ensure their approach is the best one.

To “understand what the options are, and what the challenges are, it’s unbelievable,” said David Hoganson, a pediatric heart surgeon and director of the hospital’s computational 3D visualization program. Digital models have been used in approximately 1,300 surgeries so far.

Digital twinning has come of age in medicine during the last several years, moving into models for lungs, livers, brains, joints, eyes, blood vessels and other body parts. A virtual twin of an entire human being is somewhere in the future. The technology is also being used to test new medical devices and even drugs, with computer models powerful enough to predict a new molecule’s impact on organs and cells. It holds the potential to scale back, or even replace, the use of animals in experiments and humans in clinical trials.

Read more here: [https://www.washingtonpost.com/health/interactive/2024/virtual-surgery-digital-organs-doctors/?utm_campaign=wp_main&utm_medium=social&utm_source=reddit.com](https://www.washingtonpost.com/health/interactive/2024/virtual-surgery-digital-organs-doctors/?utm_campaign=wp_main&utm_medium=social&utm_source=reddit.com)

That’s what they say – in fact there’s an island where your clone lives and they kill him to take the organ you need.