3 ms·

What purpose does this serve? It's not clear to me that any biological system is understood at this level of detail. Any simulation is likely to be garbage-in,

What purpose does this serve? It's not clear to me that any biological system is understood at this level of detail. Any simulation is likely to be garbage-in, garbage-out. And even if it were fully understood, there's not enough computing power on the planet to model every atom and every molecule. The map is not the territory, people. All models are wrong, but some are still useful. The ability to make simplifying assumptions is the whole point.

mpalmer 2y ago
"There’s a quantity called “wall shear stress,” which is just a frictional force on the wall. We’ve shown that when doctors can visualize that wall shear stress at different parts of the artery, they may actually change the length of the stent that they choose. It really informs their decisions." This sounds pretty good to me? The point of fluid dynamics and any other science of physical process is about refining a set of those simplifying assumptions. You don't model every atom or molecule, that's what fluid dynamics is for.
_uhtu 2y ago
This is just one of the thousands of cases of a journalists fawning over any ML/AI thing with no understanding of the garbage-in garbage-out problem, and all the other issues with ML. You are completely right, attempting to simulate an individuals coronary systems is 100% out of our wheelhouse right now. At very best it's going to tell us things we already know, that people with clogged arteries are at risk of a heart attack. At worst it's a grift on par with fully body scans on healthy individuals. I'm not saying ML is useless, far from it, but this is reminding me a lot of Eric Yuan (the CEO of Zoom) talking about AI clones in meetings: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dKmAg4S2KeE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dKmAg4S2KeE
- simonw 2y ago
  The only similarity I see between this and the dumb Zoom thing is that the term "digital twin" sounds like it should mean "that stupid idea where you send your clone to a meeting". That's not what "digital twin" means though: it's been used to describe digital simulations of systems (like the circulatory system described in this story) for a long time: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_twin https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_twin I've seen the dumb AI clone idea called "personal digital twins". I don't like that it steals and dumbs down the existing useful term but we may be stuck with it.
cactusfrog 2y ago
A significant amount of health issues result from medical noncompliance. A digital twin might be useful for finding ways of manipulating patients into taking care of their health.
OldGuyInTheClub 2y ago
It makes consultants very very rich. Digital Twins are part of every buzzword infested "Digital Transformation" effort in my industry.
- johnwalkr 2y ago
  I don't trust this buzzword, because I've seen it recently my industry (space). An industry where there are very good thermal, mechanical, kinematic, electrical(I could go on) models, all correlated to real-life testing, and usually an entire spacecraft simulator is available and used for operator training. There is complete traceability to every critical component. And even in this industry, in which a product has many correlated models made by different engineering disciplines and through a paperwork trail can identify the root cause of almost any issue, and then have the issue reproduced in the relevant model or a simulator "digital twin" doesn't mean "find a way to take all the available model outputs, test data, etc and predict a a failure mode". People have been working on doing this for decades. It ignores all of these available inputs and says "use AI and stuff to make a digital twin".
  - OldGuyInTheClub 2y ago
    I think I may agree? What I see is Digital Twins with "AI and stuff" being promised as the savior of design onto manufacture then deployment and eventually operation. Draw block diagrams and software magically checks and flags errors which can then be fixed. Then, the model becomes "the truth" even when reality intervenes. Pretty tall order especially if the thing is the first or only one of its kind. There's also an implicit bias towards everything being decomposed as if it were digital and cleanly separable. Reality is much more analog and interconnected.
lou1306 2y ago
It is worth noticing that, while the article might be trivializing the topic a bit, the researcher won an ACM Prize in Computing so I would wager she knows what she is doing. Digital twins may be a buzzword but there is also very very solid research into them, pretty much like AI/ML.

mpalmer 2y ago

"There’s a quantity called “wall shear stress,” which is just a frictional force on the wall. We’ve shown that when doctors can visualize that wall shear stress at different parts of the artery, they may actually change the length of the stent that they choose. It really informs their decisions." This sounds pretty good to me? The point of fluid dynamics and any other science of physical process is about refining a set of those simplifying assumptions. You don't model every atom or molecule, that's what fluid dynamics is for.

_uhtu 2y ago

This is just one of the thousands of cases of a journalists fawning over any ML/AI thing with no understanding of the garbage-in garbage-out problem, and all the other issues with ML. You are completely right, attempting to simulate an individuals coronary systems is 100% out of our wheelhouse right now. At very best it's going to tell us things we already know, that people with clogged arteries are at risk of a heart attack. At worst it's a grift on par with fully body scans on healthy individuals. I'm not saying ML is useless, far from it, but this is reminding me a lot of Eric Yuan (the CEO of Zoom) talking about AI clones in meetings: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dKmAg4S2KeE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dKmAg4S2KeE

simonw 2y ago
The only similarity I see between this and the dumb Zoom thing is that the term "digital twin" sounds like it should mean "that stupid idea where you send your clone to a meeting". That's not what "digital twin" means though: it's been used to describe digital simulations of systems (like the circulatory system described in this story) for a long time: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_twin https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_twin I've seen the dumb AI clone idea called "personal digital twins". I don't like that it steals and dumbs down the existing useful term but we may be stuck with it.

cactusfrog 2y ago

A significant amount of health issues result from medical noncompliance. A digital twin might be useful for finding ways of manipulating patients into taking care of their health.

OldGuyInTheClub 2y ago

It makes consultants very very rich. Digital Twins are part of every buzzword infested "Digital Transformation" effort in my industry.

johnwalkr 2y ago
I don't trust this buzzword, because I've seen it recently my industry (space). An industry where there are very good thermal, mechanical, kinematic, electrical(I could go on) models, all correlated to real-life testing, and usually an entire spacecraft simulator is available and used for operator training. There is complete traceability to every critical component. And even in this industry, in which a product has many correlated models made by different engineering disciplines and through a paperwork trail can identify the root cause of almost any issue, and then have the issue reproduced in the relevant model or a simulator "digital twin" doesn't mean "find a way to take all the available model outputs, test data, etc and predict a a failure mode". People have been working on doing this for decades. It ignores all of these available inputs and says "use AI and stuff to make a digital twin".
- OldGuyInTheClub 2y ago
  I think I may agree? What I see is Digital Twins with "AI and stuff" being promised as the savior of design onto manufacture then deployment and eventually operation. Draw block diagrams and software magically checks and flags errors which can then be fixed. Then, the model becomes "the truth" even when reality intervenes. Pretty tall order especially if the thing is the first or only one of its kind. There's also an implicit bias towards everything being decomposed as if it were digital and cleanly separable. Reality is much more analog and interconnected.

lou1306 2y ago

It is worth noticing that, while the article might be trivializing the topic a bit, the researcher won an ACM Prize in Computing so I would wager she knows what she is doing. Digital twins may be a buzzword but there is also very very solid research into them, pretty much like AI/ML.