A virtual model based on the digital twin technology was the highlight of a biomedical engineering forum held jointly by the United States and Taiwan on Tuesday in California.
With the use of the AI-based digital twin technology, doctors will be able to test the effectiveness of medications on a patient’s digital twin before administering the drugs to the patient, according to Renee Yao (姚睿君) of NVIDIA, an American company that is at the forefront of artificial intelligence technology development globally.
AI technology can also be adopted to determine which of the numerous cells in the human body are not functioning well, and thus it can help physicians to prescribe the right medicines, Yao said at the U.S.-Taiwan Biomedical Engineering Forum (UTBEF) in Santa Clara.
Yao, who leads global healthcare AI startups at NVIDIA, said the new technology also allows for faster development of new drugs.
“In earlier years, it took at least 10 years to develop a new drug, and it cost about US$10 billion to bring it to market, but now the process takes only two months and cost about US$2 million,” she said.
The digitalization of genomic and organ data, as well as surgery, gives researchers and healthcare professionals access to a digital world in which they can simulate, validate, and predict outcomes with greater accuracy, Yao said.
Specifically, a digital twin is a virtual model that is designed with the use of real world data to accurately reflect a physical object, combining several core technologies such as AI, the Internet of Things (IoT), cloud, and Extended Reality (XR), according to experts in the area.
NVIDIA has been at the forefront of the efforts to adopt such technologies for use in the healthcare sector, providing support to more than 1,800 healthcare startups in the fields of digital health, medical instruments, medical imaging, genomics, and drug discovery.
The American company’s representative was among 17 other experts from the U.S. and Taiwan who attended this year’s UTBEF physically and virtually to discuss ways of solving current and future problems in the biomedical sector.
The Taiwanese attendees included Ho Hong-nerng (何弘能), former superintendent of National Taiwan University Hospital; Yu Kun-hsing (余坤興), an assistant professor at Harvard Medical School; and Chen Huei-sheng (陳惠生), a doctor and faculty member at Indiana University School of Medicine.
UTBEF was initiated in 2008 by Joseph Yang (楊啟航), former director of the Science and Technology Division of the Taipei Economic and Cultural Office in San Francisco.
Since 2014, the Taiwanese American Industrial Technology Association Silicon Valley (TAITA-SV) has been hosting the forum.
Source: Focus Taiwan News Channel