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NASEM’s report on Digital Twins is now available!

“Foundational Research Gaps & Future Directions for Digital Twins,” published by the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine (NASEM) identifies cross-sector challenges and recommendations to support this potentially transformative approach for biomedical research. Priorities include development of multi-agency collaborations with industry to advance the mathematical, statistical, and computational…

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Request for Information: Calling all Researchers and Healthcare Community Contributors

NEW NCI Childhood Cancer Data Initiative (CCDI) Request for Information (RFI) on Electronic Health Record (EHR) data! Responses due using the submission webform by February 29, 2024.  NCI’s CCDI invites participation from all stakeholders across the cancer research and health care community including vendors and developers in understanding information on existing capabilities for automated EHR…

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NCI-DOE Collaboration 2020 Virtual Ideas Lab:

Toward Building a Cancer Patient “Digital Twin”   July 6-10, 2020

The virtual 5-day Ideas Lab, Toward Building a Cancer Patient “Digital Twin” was held to develop innovative cross-disciplinary collaborations and shape the future of predictive modeling across scales from biology to clinical care.

Selected from more than 130 applicants, 30 scientists from various career stages participated in the workshop with expertise in

  • artificial intelligence
  • bioinformatics
  • biomedical engineering
  • cancer research
  • clinical practice
  • computational and data science
  • healthcare delivery
  • mathematical modeling

They represented academic institutions, medical schools, national laboratories, non-profit research institutes, cancer centers, and clinical care centers. During the week, participants got to know each other and formed project teams based on their areas of interest in developing a cancer patient digital twin. Six multidisciplinary mentors guided project teams in refining their research concepts. The mentors’ areas of expertise included: medical oncology, radiation research, mathematical modeling, high performance computing, and data analytics, computational science, and deep learning/HPC and AI for healthcare.

Watch the Call to Action presented by Michael Cooke, Department of Energy, Office of Science; Emily Greenspan, National Cancer Institute; and Eric Stahlberg, Frederick National Laboratory for Cancer Research.

If you have difficulty watching the video, click this link to download the opening presentation of the Digital Twin Ideas Lab.

Outcomes

At the end of the week, six teams presented their project proposals and received additional feedback from the mentors. Each project focuses on a digital twin component that, within the next 2-3 years, will advance the development of a model of an individual cancer patient. These projects have the potential to lead to disease and intervention-specific models and simulations, using mathematical, active learning, and ensemble model approaches. Project teams applied for seed funding made possible by the U.S. Department of Energy and NCI, through the Frederick National Laboratory for Cancer Research.

The six projects are listed below.

  • Predictable Healthy Digital Twins for Continuous Early Monitoring and Guided Prevention
  • Digital Twin Prognosticator
  • Overcoming and Preventing Resistance through Digital Twins
  • Multiscale Digital Twins for Predicting Optimal Treatment Pathway for Individual Cancer Patients
  • Multimodal Hybrid Digital Twin for Treatment Resistance
  • My Virtual Cancer Patient, Will It Metastasize?
Created by Petrina Hollingsworth Last Modified Tue April 26, 2022 8:07 pm by Lynn Borkon