Virtual patients with diseases that precisely mimic real-life patients are the next frontier in medicine. Such "digital twins" would allow health researchers to drastically speed the development of new treatments.
But before those digital patients can be created, scientists must train computer systems to recognize tens of thousands of threats from inside and outside our bodies and to understand lessons gleaned from billions of data points from actual patients.
Current technology can't interpret the vast and inconsistent information from patients along with the complex data accumulating from our social, built, and physical environments. Smartphones just aren't smart enough to understand the complexities of diabetes, for example.
But a new five-year, $3 million research project funded by the NIH's National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences aims to create the digital dictionary and playbook to help technology replicate the way humans experience disease.
