"Digital twins will be essential to make precision medicine a reality"

And that’s quite a task: “I see that there's a huge lack of efficiency. Our patients really get lost in the system sometimes. And one of the worst things taking the patient’s perspective is the lack of information. Patients do not know: What are the next steps? What would be the best treatment? And what about my life expectancy? What about my outcome? – These are all the questions that we have to answer. It’s my goal to address this problem.” Driven by the urge to create a better healthcare, Ulrike Attenberger became a strong believer that novel technologies can support clinicians in doing just that. In our video interview, she shares her perspective on AI, digital twins and the future of healthcare.

Ulrike Attenberger is deeply convinced that close interdisciplinary collaboration is needed to use the full potential of technologies like AI: “We need the experience from people that are developing, evaluating, and building the machines; from people that are training the models, and from those people who sort of have the medical experience – because the medical experience defines the need.”

Jointly managing to unleash the potential of those technologies through interdisciplinary collaboration is one thing that’s needed. On the other hand, there are still a couple of structural challenges that need to be dealt with, like the questions of how to collect and sort the needed data adequately, and a lack of legal and ethical frameworks for those novel technologies. If we manage to overcome them though, we could be on our way to a better healthcare, to a more precise and personalized medicine that is tailored to the individual patient: “I would say the best future scenario would be that we have fully integrated digital twins in our clinical-decision making for diagnostics as well as treatment decisions,” Ulrike Attenberger explains. 

Those patient twins could also help to prevent people from getting lost in the system in the future: “Digital twins, in my opinion, are very essential for making precision medicine a reality in healthcare, because they are creating an environment to make life-saving decisions based on real time and historic data. From a patient's perspective, I would say that the benefit is that transparency will be increased: If treatment effects can be simulated on a virtual model of mine, it will be much easier to understand what impact a certain kind of treatment has for my life, and moreover, if you think about using wearables to feed information into a twin patients – or better: people, they get self-empowered, they can literally see, how certain lifestyle behaviors will influence their health in a positive or negative manner.”