A digital twin is a dynamic virtual model of a physical object, system, or person that mirrors its real-world counterpart using real-time data to simulate, predict, and optimize performance or behavior. In healthcare, a digital twin represents an individual patient’s physiology and health data designed for a specific context of use, enabling simulation of treatments, prediction of disease progression, and personalized care.

Digital twins are poised to become a pillar of future medicine, combining data, machine learning, and biomedical simulations for many potential applications. They can simulate individual responses to treatments, helping tailor therapies safely. For disease modeling, they can predict how conditions such as intracranial aneurysms develop, supporting disease management. In drug development and device design, digital twins allow virtual testing of new solutions, reducing time and cost. Surgeons use them for planning and training, rehearsing procedures on virtual replicas of patient anatomy. Today, digital twins are an active area of research, and first clinical applications are already emerging—for example, in the EU project GEMINI.

Digital twins should be a human-centered technology after all, which requires reflecting on how clinicians, patients, and researchers interact with them. Even the metaphor “digital twin” sparks a range of emotions, potentially shaping how we imagine ourselves in relation to this technology. By blurring the boundary between physical and digital identity, digital twins challenge our sense of control over health and raise ethical considerations regarding identity, trust, and agency.

Medicine often involves incomplete knowledge, requiring clinicians to make decisions under uncertainty. Digital twins offer a more comprehensive understanding of a clinical situation, but they must not foster an overly deterministic view of health outcomes. Their predictive power underscores both the transformative potential and the socio-ethical complexities of this technology.

In this seminar, Sven will introduce the core concepts behind digital twins and explore their applications through practical examples from medicine and healthcare. By grounding the discussion in real-world use cases, the aim is to build a shared understanding of what digital twins can achieve—and where their limitations lie. This foundation will serve as a starting point for an open, interdisciplinary dialogue that will make both the transformative potential and the challenges of this emerging technology more tangible and accessible.