Hey, I'm Flora Lichten, and you're listening to Science Friday.

There's an idea bubbling up in medicine.

It's called digital twins.

If it's giving you second life vibes, that's not it.

The rough idea is to create a digital model of you.

So taking your personal health data like genetic info, blood

test results, imaging scans, family history, and compiling it into a simulation that can be then

used to help predict how a treatment might work for you. Think personalized medicine supercharged

by AI. So how would this be useful? How would it work? What are the

concerns? Here to tell us more is Dr. Caroline Chung, a radiation oncologist at the forefront of

this digital twin research. She's co-director of the Institute for Data Science Oncology at UTMD Anderson Cancer Center.

Caroline, thanks for being here.

Thanks for having me.

Did we get that description of digital twins right?

I think that that's a good high-level overview of how digital twins potentially could be

used in the future.

But.

Having said that the definition of digital twins has been blurry at best, and many people

are using this term to mean many different things. Some people imagine a digital twin to be

their digital avatar or some visual representation of all of the data that we're collecting

of you within the medical space. But these are not necessarily all digital twins from a true

perspective of what a digital twin was intended to be as it was born out in the aerospace

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