Virtual human could revolutionize medicine

Editor's note: As artificial intelligence becomes increasingly integrated with the life sciences, virtual reality has emerged as a major frontier of scientific research. Science and Technology Daily spoke to Zhao Qinping, an academician of the Chinese Academy of Engineering, on the pursuit of a virtual human for medical purposes. The views don't necessarily represent those of China Daily.

The improvement in visual realism, physical accuracy, intelligent virtual characters and natural human-computer interaction has greatly expanded the application potential of virtual reality.

In healthcare, AI assists or even replaces physicians in diagnosing and treating diseases, while VR helps create virtual replicas of patients' organs or pathological conditions. Surgeons can rehearse, evaluate and refine surgical plans on these virtual organs before performing operations on real patients.

But the application of VR in medicine still lags behind the potential. The basic obstacle is the lack of a medical virtual human capable of accurately reproducing the features, physical properties and physiological characteristics of the human body.

Medical science has long faced three major challenges. First, the training of highly qualified medical professionals still depends on laboratory animals and human cadavers, a traditional approach that is becoming increasingly unsustainable. Second, there is still no effective method for rehearsing, evaluating and optimizing surgical plans before operations. Third, the development of new drugs and medical devices also relies on animal testing and human volunteers, resulting in high costs, lengthy development cycles and considerable risks.

A medical virtual human could provide medical students with highly realistic digital models of healthy and diseased human bodies for anatomical education, surgical training and other clinical exercises, substantially reducing reliance on animals and cadavers.

Personalized virtual models of patients' organs could be created to simulate, evaluate and refine surgical procedures, improving both precision and success rates. Virtual humans could also replace some animal experiments and early-stage human testing in the development of pharmaceutical drugs and medical devices, shortening research and development cycles while reducing costs and risks.

However, research on virtual humans is fragmented and lacks a coherent, systematic framework. While some areas have received considerable attention, others remain largely unexplored. Currently, digital models have been developed for fewer than 20 percent of human organs, with research primarily focusing on geometric modeling, physical simulation and surgical interaction.

Studies of microscopic physiological mechanisms remain disconnected from organ-level physical and physiological modeling, and integrated research at the level of the entire physiological system has yet to begin. At the same time, China lacks sufficient data to support the development of medical virtual humans, with much of the current research relying on overseas datasets.

Developing a medical virtual human is a frontier endeavor that brings together information science, life sciences, medicine, mathematics, physics and chemistry. It requires multidisciplinary collaboration among experts from these fields to jointly build a comprehensive "Chinese medical virtual human".

The relevant authorities should organize universities, research institutes, hospitals and technology companies to establish a high-level collaborative network that integrates studies of human cells, tissues, organs and physiological systems while coordinating theoretical breakthroughs, technological innovation and demonstration applications.

Meanwhile, full use should be made of AI foundation models to build dedicated data and model centers, together with the computing infrastructure needed to support the development of medical virtual humans.