Manel Escobar

Imagining how a disease might progress or predicting whether a treatment will work before it is administered to a patient. These are some of the possibilities offered by human digital twins: virtual replicas of organs or biological systems created using real clinical data. Vall d’Hebron University Hospital aims to take this technology one step further by becoming the first hospital in Europe to co-develop these models with companies in the technology sector. This will be done through the STEP project, which has received €11.7 million in funding from the European Regional Development Fund (ERDF) and will spend the next three years developing solutions to improve the diagnosis and treatment of congenital and complex diseases. Planned applications include models that will help detect heart conditions in children, improve migraine treatment and enable more precise planning of complex surgical procedures.

As Manel Escobar, Clinical Director of Radiology at Vall d’Hebron — a department encompassing both Radiology and Nuclear Medicine — explains, the aim is to “solve a clinical problem”: to predict the effects a treatment may have before it is administered and use this information to support medical decision-making. Escobar holds a degree in Medicine and Surgery from the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona and is a specialist in Diagnostic Radiology. His experience in this field is particularly relevant to the project, as images obtained through diagnostic tests such as CT scans and MRI scans are one of the sources of information used to create these virtual models.