The Rise of Digital Twins in Healthcare: A Mapping of the Research Landscape

Abstract

The place of digital twin technology in any healthcare system is a truly disruptive innovation that has profound consequences all across medical research and practice. Digital twins represent the virtual replicas that correspond to some physical entity by pulling real-time data streams from different sources to model biological systems for health monitoring and personalization of treatment strategies. This paper presents a detailed review of the current research landscape into digital twins for healthcare. Through bibliometric analysis, we obtained 1,663 publications from 2012 to 2024, basically sourced from the Scopus database, establishing a portion of the trends, productive authors, influential sources, and collaboration networks in this fast-evolving field. Descriptively, our results indicate that although research into this area started way back, the bulk of research began to be realized from 2018 onwards, with appreciable contributions coming in from interdisciplinary fields of artificial intelligence, machine learning, and data analytics. Even with challenges to data interoperability and other privacy concerns, this change brought on by digital twin technology is undoubtedly a considerable promise for chronic disease management, predictive analytics, drug discovery, and surgical planning. This work brings immense insight into this new domain of digital twins in health, which shall set up a strong foundation for future research and innovation in this area.

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