EDITH

The mission of the European Coordination and Support Action EDITH-CSA (Ecosystem for Digital Twins in Healthcare), funded by the European Commission, is to build up a pan-European ecosystem for the integration of single organ model systems into a fully integrated multi-scale and multi-organ Virtual Human Twin (VHT). Such a VHT is a patient-specific virtual representation of real-world systems or processes, that is built on data-driven and knowledge-driven predictive computer models. It can be used as a clinical decision-support system, a personal health forecasting tool or as a tool for the development and personalisation of medical products. This will help to improve the personalised and optimized treatment of patients, as well as the individualised health protection. For integration and exchange of the data and models used to construct VHTs they all must be highly interoperable.

Starting from a comprehensive roadmap of the current landscape, EDITH will implement a federated cloud-based repository, gathering human digital twin resources (models, data sets, algorithms, good practices), and design the architecture of a simulation platform to facilitate the transition towards the use of comprehensive Virtual Human Twin (VHT) models in personalised medicine.

The main task of the SDBV group in EDITH is to ensure that the proper standards for modelling, data annotation with metadata and provenance information, and for data storage are used, so that the VHT components are interoperable and of high quality. Important standards with this aim are international ISO standards for life science data formatting and data description (ISO 20691), for the modelling and simulation process (ISO/TS 9491-1) and for provenance information about biological material and data (ISO 23494 series), that are defined under the leadership of group members in the ISO committee for data processing and integration in biotechnology (ISO/TC 276/WG 5). More specific formats for sharing specific model components are also recommended and corresponding support will be implemented in the EDITH resources that are built, like e.g. for molecular and cellular models in SBML and CellML format. Such model formats are defined by the worldwide modelling community, e.g. the COMBINE (Computational Modelling in Biology) Network, the SDBV group is involved in already for many years. For credibility assessment the VHTs and their model components the ASME V&V40 standard will be exploited in EDITH and further standardisation will be initiated and driven by the SDBV group where need.

The widely used FAIRDOM-SEEK platform, that the SDBV group already develops since many years with partners in the UK and elsewhere, will be integrated in the EDITH infrastructure and provide a blueprint for the connection of the EDITH infrastructure to existing data and model management tools. For this the SDBV group is doing the needed adaptions in the SEEK system. This will demonstrate the scalability of this emerging European infrastructure for Virtual Human Twin.