A Brief History of Digital Twin Technology

Emerging from NASA's spacecraft simulations in the 1960s, digital twin (DT) technology has advanced through industrial adoption to spark a health care transformation. A DT is a dynamic, data-driven virtual counterpart of a physical system, continuously updated through real-time data streams and capable of bidirectional interaction. In medicine, DT integrates imaging, multi-omics, biosensors, and computational models to generate patient-specific simulations that support diagnosis, treatment planning, and drug development. Representative applications include cardiac DT for predicting arrhythmia treatment outcomes, oncology DT for tracking tumor progression and optimizing radiotherapy, and pharmacologic DT for accelerating drug discovery through in silico trials.