Shanghai's Ruijin Hospital launches intl digital twin health initiative

Shanghai-based Ruijin Hospital launched an international consortium of digital twins in medicine and healthcare in collaboration with institutions from home and abroad on Friday, advancing an initiative to ultimately create human health digital twins for 50 million individuals.

Ruijin Hospital, which is affiliated with Shanghai Jiao Tong University School of Medicine, explained that the initiative seeks to address how accumulated health information from physical examinations, long-term follow-ups, and daily monitoring can be interconnected to detect disease risks earlier.

By integrating longitudinal health data with dynamic models, researchers aim to map individual health trajectories, providing a basis for disease prevention and personalized treatment, according to the hospital.

The consortium, called ICDT-HM in short, will promote the deep integration of large-scale longitudinal cohort studies with artificial intelligence, fostering international consensus on data standards, cross-population validation and data governance. The goal is to gradually construct predictive and simulatable digital twins of human health, with the initiative's target set at 50 million individuals, progressing in phases.

During Friday's launch, the consortium also announced its committee members, core work plans and research progress. Experts in related fields and editors from top international journals were invited to discuss the integration of population health with AI, exploring the development pathways of digital twins in disease mechanism research, dynamic monitoring, risk prediction, scientific evaluation and clinical translation.

Ning Guang, an academician with the Chinese Academy of Engineering and president of Ruijin Hospital, said the profound value of digital twins lies in navigating the future in a virtual world to prevent avoidable diseases.

"It is important to integrate multidimensional data — biological, physiological, psychological, behavioral, social and environmental — to construct digital life coordinates, shifting health assessment from a binary state to a measurable, predictable and navigable continuum," he said.

Luo Dajin, director of the Shanghai Municipal Science and Technology Commission, noted that digital twins in healthcare are at the intersection of AI, life sciences and data elements.

"The consortium is expected to focus on major diseases, such as metabolic disorders, cardiovascular diseases and cancer, integrating data of multiple dimensions, including clinical diagnosis, long-term follow-up and wearable devices, to strengthen basic research and clinical validation. We also expect it to deepen international cooperation to promote the application of digital twin achievements in healthcare," he said.