AI used to create 'digital twin' hearts that let surgeons test out their technique

Armed with a mouse and computer screen instead of a scalpel and operating theatre, cardiologist Benjamin Meder carefully places the electrodes of a pacemaker in a beating, digital heart. Using this'digital twin' that mimics the electrical and physical properties of the cells in patient 7497's heart, Meder runs simulations to see if the pacemaker can keep the congestive heart failure sufferer alive - before he has inserted a knife. The digital heart twin developed by Siemens Healthineers is one example of how medical device makers are using artificial intelligence (AI) to help doctors make more precise diagnoses as medicine enters an increasingly personalized age. Siemens Healthineers has built up a vast database of more than 250 million annotated images, reports and operational data on which to train its new algorithms. In the example of the digital twin, the AI system was trained to weave together data about the electrical and physical properties and the structure of a heart into a 3D image.