Virtual You: How Building Your Digital Twin Will Revolutionize Medicine And Change Your Life

This book describes the revolutionary efforts underway to build virtual humans - from cells and organs to whole bodies and populations. Virtual human technology has extraordinary potential, but also poses enormous computational challenges. Digital doppelgängers of patients will be able to usher in an era of truly personalized medicine, in which virtual drug trials can be conducted on thousands of digital twins, and health-casts" can give you an idea of what a change in diet and lifestyle would really mean for you. Your "virtual you" will change your healthcare and potentially extend your lifespan (while also raising philosophical and ethical questions). However, numerous challenges and problems need to be solved to build such virtual versions of humans and to make truly personalized and predictive medicine possible. These challenges largely reside in the domains of the computer and physical sciences, and they are the real focus of this book. Building a "virtual you" touches on a wide r