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With 'digital twins,' the doctor will see you now

By creating digital twin of your circulatory system, Amanda Randles wants to bring unprecedented precision to medical forecasts.

Fully personalized medical simulations, or “digital twins,” are still beyond our abilities, but Randles has pioneered computer models of blood flow over long durations that are already helping doctors noninvasively diagnose and treat diseases. I had been interviewing for an operating systems job in Texas, and then they called and said, “We have an opening in Minnesota on the IBM Blue Gene supercomputer team.” I was really lucky to get put on that team. The standard of care is to put a guide wire directly in the artery to measure pressure before and after any narrowing — the ratio of those two numbers is called “fractional flow reserve.” We used the simulation to calculate the same thing, noninvasively.

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