Modern medicine is getting a powerful new tool: digital twin technology. These patient-specific virtual models of organs, tissues, and even surgical environments, can allow surgeons to practice complex procedures before entering the operating room.
While this innovation, also called digital twin surgery, is still in the early stages, it carries the potential to redefine preoperative planning and surgical training. This article examines how surgical simulation with digital twins works, what its real-world impact looks like, and how it results in safer and more successful surgeries.
From Operating Room to Digital Model
Surgical simulation is the practice of using digital or physical models to rehearse surgical procedures, evaluate risks, and refine skills before real operations. In medicine, a digital twin is a highly detailed, dynamic model of a patient’s anatomy. The addition of digital twin technology to surgical training and simulation has the power to greatly reduce risk to the patient and improve health outcomes.
To build a digital twin for surgical simulation, medical teams combine healthcare data from a number of sources – biometric data, medical records, and advanced imaging technologies such as MRI, CT scans, and 3D ultrasound. This data is then processed with AI algorithms and modeling to create a simulation that mirrors real tissue behavior.
Unlike static 3D images, digital twins allow surgeons to interact with a responsive model of a patient’s anatomy. A surgeon can virtually cut, suture, or reposition the virtual copy of a patient’s actual organ and watch how blood vessels, nerves, or muscles react.
This virtual surgery planning ensures that when a surgeon enters the operating room, they aren’t walking in “blind.” They’re executing a plan tested on a patient’s exact biological copy, without risking harm to that patient.
Enhancing Preoperative Planning
Surgical simulation plays an extremely important role in preoperative planning. Complex surgeries involving critical blood vessels or multiple tissue layers carry significant risk. By rehearsing these procedures on a patient-specific digital twin, surgeons can:
Map out incision paths and optimal approaches.
Predict where complications, such as bleeding or nerve damage, could occur.
Adjust their strategies before any real incision is made.
For example, the use of digital twin technology in heart surgery planning allows surgeons to simulate how a patient’s blood flow might change after a bypass or valve replacement. Surgeons can use these simulations to minimize the risks of clotting or post-operative complications. This results in higher confidence going into the procedure and a greater likelihood of successful patient outcomes.
Real-World Case Studies
The use of digital twins in medical settings is not widespread around the globe quite yet. But the number of use cases and companies focused on digital twins in surgery is growing rapidly:
Skull Base Surgery: Skull base surgery is used for benign or cancerous growths located on the underside of the brain, the base of the skull and the upper vertebrae of the spinal column. A digital twin framework called Twin-S has been developed specifically for skull base surgery, and it captures the real-world surgical progress and updates the virtual model in real time.
Orthopedic Surgery: The French company Twinsight offers digital twin technology for orthopedic surgery. This technology enables virtual simulation of knee and hip prosthesis placement and to help optimize implant positioning.
Cardiac Care: Teams at Boston Children’s Hospital create patient-specific digital heart copies to plan their most difficult cardiac surgeries. This technology was enabled by the Living Heart Project – one of the earliest and largest digital twin initiatives in healthcare.
Liver Transplant: Calling itself the GPS for surgeons, Twinical is developing virtual reality replicas of the liver to use before, during, and after medical procedures. The company won the Grand Prize in the 2022 i-Lab innovation competition.
These case studies show how digital twin surgical simulation is already helping surgeons provide precise and patient-tailored care.
Training the Next Generation of Surgeons
Beyond patient care, the use of digital twins in surgical training is also set to revolutionize how medical professionals are trained. Traditionally, surgeons have learned their skills through cadaver labs or supervised practice on live patients. While effective, these approaches come with ethical and practical limits.
Digital twins allow trainees to enter a digital twin operating room simulation environment and rehearse procedures repeatedly. These virtual labs offer:
Risk-free practice: Students can make mistakes and learn from them without harming patients.
Objective skills assessment: Simulations track metrics like incision precision, time efficiency, and error rates.
Complex case exposure: Trainees can practice rare or high-risk surgeries they might not otherwise encounter during residency.
The benefits of surgical simulation training include shorter learning curves, higher skill mastery, and reduced stress when entering real operating rooms. These training tools could make an especially outsized impact in complex fields like neurosurgery or cardiac surgery, where precision is non-negotiable.
Challenges and the Road Ahead
Like any emerging technology, digital twins in healthcare and surgical planning face hurdles including:
Data accuracy: Surgical simulation models are only as good as the imaging and algorithms behind them. Inaccurate inputs could lead to misleading simulations.
Accessibility: Building a patient-specific digital twin can be resource-intensive. This could limit the technology’s use.
Privacy and regulation: Patient data security is crucial, but regulators are still catching up to define standards for clinical use.
Despite these challenges, the momentum for digital twins in surgery is undeniable. Advances in AI, imaging, and computational power are making medical simulation and digital twins more and more of a reality.
The key takeaway is this: digital twin surgical simulation is set to reshape how surgeons prepare, how patients are operated on, and how the next generation of medical professionals are trained. The next time you or a loved one needs an operation, there’s a growing chance it will first be planned or performed in a virtual environment, long before a scalpel touches skin.
For more on the ways digital twin technology is being applied to medicine, read this next: Digital Twins in Healthcare: The Future of Personalized Medicine
