How do we prepare for future health challenges before challenges turn into problems? On October 14, Sweden’s leading experts and researchers bring together medical, psychological, technological and societal perspectives for an inspiring and dynamic afternoon on strategies for preventive healthcare. ISB Group leader and AI expert Gunnar Cedersund together with Sweden’s foremost health guru Johan Holmäster will be presenting medical digital twins that motivate, prevent risks and show the way towards a healthier society.
On May 6, Gunnar Cedersund held the opening keynote presentation at a workshop in Gothenburg. The event was arranged by the Gothenburg Center for Digital Health, and featured lots of interesting presentations during the day. The title of the event was “From idea to patient benefit”, and the various talks dealt with innovative ideas and technologies, utilizing e.g. AI, drones and robots, patient-centered medicine, etc. Gunnar’s opening keynote presentation dealt with, as usual, our digital twins, and outlined how they are developed in order to help transform healthcare into one centered around P4-medicine: personalized, predictive, preventive, and participatory medicine. This will be done by giving all patients access to their own digital twin. This twin is constantly updated, by combining wearable sensors, electronic healthcare records (journal data), and qualitative observations done by the patients themselves. The twin will then be used by the patient himself/herself, as well as by a variety of different actors, such as personal trainers and health coaches, medical doctors, physiotherapists, eldercare personnel, relatives, etc. A first clinical study, to test this idea, will start in the autumn, as part of the big STRATIF-AI project.
Slide from the presentation, featuring the core idea of using digital twins to allow for P4 medicine
On May 21, we held a new edition of the workshop entitled “BME@LIU day”. This is an annual event, revolving around Biomedical Engineering (BME) at Linköping University (LIU). For the last 4 years, Gunnar Cedersund has been the chair of the program committee, and we are therefore heavily involved in the arrangement of this conference.
One of the most fun things with this event is that it is growing steadily (see graph above). When Gunnar took over 4 years ago, there were just above 100 participants, and the program consisted of a single track the whole day. Since then, the event has grown in different ways, and we now have multiple parallel sessions, which are co-arranged with various other organizations, and the number of participants has grown to 250. This has also been accompanied with a corresponding growth in the number of students and companies participating in the local arena and poster session throughout the day (see picture below).
Photo by Thor Balkhed
This year, we featured two keynote speakers: i) Mikael Forsgren from MathCore, who gave an abridged version of the opening keynote presentation held at the gigantic EASD conference last year, ii) Ralph Maddison, from Australia, who spoke about his SMART home, which features various eHealth solutions and sensors, to aid in a new smart and integrated living situation for heart failure patients. More information about the program and event can be found at the BME Conference website as well as in the news article written by LIU, featuring lots of nice pictures from the event.
Elin Nyman and Henrik Podéus both participated in the 2025 Systems Biology of Human Disease (SBHD) conference, held in Berlin and hosted by the Berlin Institute of Health (BIH) at Charité – Universitätsmedizin Berlin.
Elin Nyman presented “Machine Learning for Forensic Predictions of Time and Cause of Death”, showcasing how metabolomics data combined with machine learning models can support forensic investigations.
Henrik Podéus presented hiw work on “Enhancing Disease Screening Through Alcohol Consumption Markers and Digital Monitoring Tools”, highlighting the use of our digital twin models in innovative approaches to monitor alcohol consumption.
Both Elin’s and Henrik’s contributions added valuable perspectives to the interdisciplinary agenda of the conference, which this year placed particular emphasis on artificial intelligence, cancer, infectious diseases, and aging.
Gunnar Cedersund held a presentation at the workshop “Public healthcare under change – Conditions, expectations and requirements”. This event is a part of the MultiHelix Think Tank in Lund, and was held on May 8. The event included presentations from a variety of different actors related to health, and the health ecosystem. I, Katja Woxell, was there as well, and some of my main takeaways from the event included:
Climate change is the world’s biggest health risk;
1,2 million Swedes take antidepressants, and this is made into an individual problem rather than a societal problem;
Oral healthcare is characterized by extreme inequity both world-wide and nationally;
Existential healthcare tools for mindful everyday living as well as national efforts for result- and value-driven healthcare systems are in place.
A promising national and world-wide preventive healthcare project, presented at this event, is our Medical Digital Twin, developed by Gunnar Cedersund and his colleagues. The project gives each user access to his/her own physiological digital twin that shows what is happening in the user’s body and organs now and what those processes will look like in the future, depending on the user’s lifestyle choices. The project has a potential for educating and empowering individuals to make smarter lifestyle choices that positively impact their long-term state of health. Apart from me, Gunnar Cedersund was accompanied by his colleagues – Johan Holmäster and Mats Janson. Johan and Mats are involved both in the development of eHealth solutions and health programs, and in the newer – cognitive – part of Medical Digital Twin, concerning sound lifestyle based on a triangulation of individuals’ emotions, thoughts and physical and mental healthcare practices.
Today, December 6, I, Gunnar Cedersund, am giving a lecture in a workshop arranged by the Swedish Research Council (VR). The workshop deals with 3R, and this year’s focus is on one of the “Rs”: “Replacement” of animal experiments. I was invited to give a lecture, because I have received a grant from VR’s dedicated call on 3R.
So, I presented the essence of this project, with a presentation with the same title as the research project: “Scaling from microphysiological systems to humans using scalable digital twins”. The basic idea is that our digital twins for individuals can be scaled down to e.g. a two-organs-a-chip, where a little liver and pancreatic spheroid are connected to each other (Casas et al). This downscaled twin can then be used to interpret data, understand mechanisms ,and plan new experiments on the experimental level. Apart from this, the insights entered into the down-scaled twin can be used to scale the twins back up to the human level. This latter step is called translation, and it leads to the last two steps: regulatory approval and clinical implementation. I talked about all of these steps, and also about some more general issues regarding moving this forward.
In particular, I raised the importance of taking a holistic approach, e.g. by refunding the Swedish 3R-centre, the importance of making it easier to use alternative approaches, e.g. by the creation of new core facilities, and on the importance of creating new incentives and reducing barriers for individual scientists, e.g. by including the development of more realistic experimental systems as a key criteria when evaluating research grants.
I actually made a mistake in the last post, saying that that lecture – at Öredev, Malmö, Sweden – was the third and last invited lecture that week. There was actually a fourth one upcoming: in China. This time it was at an international workshop on Digital therapeutics, i.e. eHealth and apps. It was largely focused on existing technologies, i.e. not only scientists were there, but also a lot of companies with products already on the markt, as well as the Food and Drug Administration, from the US. My lecture was given online, but a partner of mine went over there in person, to also have physical meetings, and to also help set up meetings in the New York/Boston area, to which I am travelling in the end of the month.
So – four invited presentations in one week, in four different cities, across two continents. I think that is actually a personal record 🙂
Today is the third and last public invited lecture this week. This time it is down in Hyllie, which is very close to the bridge between Malmö and Copenhagen, i.e. right on the border between the Sweden and Denmark. This lecture is again on our digital twins, and this time it is in a software and AI conference: Øredev 2024. This is a “normal” conference, which is not targeting scientists, but the general public, i.e. companies and normal citizen who are interested in software development and AI innovations, etc. This is fitting, because our research is turning increasingly more towards eHealth and app development, and even towards commercial app development via our spin-off companies. For this reason, we are also nowadays actively recruiting software and UX developers, and quite generally moving into a more public phase, targeting companies and the general public as potential customers and business partners, etc.
Picture by Roland Betnér. Program and more info for the event is available here: https://oredev.org/
