Digital Twins in Health Care: Clinical, Ethical and Legal Perspectives

Digital Twins have advanced various fields in engineering for decades and are now entering clinical care, posing several critical challenges.

A digital twin, built of data from a patient and the environment, aims to mimic the structure and behavior of the physical patient, is dynamically updated with new data, and seeks to make predictions about the patient and inform decisions.  But how should such digital entities be regulated, and how do and will they affect clinicians, clinical decisions, and patients?

This multi-disciplinary workshop brings together leading experts – data scientists, clinicians, ethicists, legal scholars and others – to explore these complex and growing cutting edge clinical, ethical and legal questions.

This event is part of the Frontiers in Data Science and AI initiative at the Data Science Institute, Columbia University, and is co-sponsored by the Columbia University Masters of Bioethics Program and the Northeast Big Data Innovation Hub.

About Registration:

• This is a hybrid event. Please select Virtual Registration if you do not plan to attend in-person and are seeking the Zoom link.
• Seating for in-person registration is limited. Attendance will be prioritized for faculty, senior researchers (PhD Students, Postdocs), and external guests (alumni, clinicians, and practitioners).
• All in-person registrations will be confirmed by the DSI Events team.

REGISTER

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Event Details & Agenda

Monday, April 27, 2026 (9:00 AM – 5:00 PM ET)
In-Person & Zoom Option

Location: Columbia School of Social Work – Room C05
Address: 1255 Amsterdam Ave, New York, NY 10027 – Map

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9:00 AM – 9:10 AM: Welcome Remarks (10 min)

• Robert Klitzman, Professor of Psychiatry (in Sociomedical Sciences), Columbia University Irving Medical Center; Program Director, Bioethics Program, School of Professional Studies, Columbia University

9:10 AM – 9:30 AM: Introduction: What are digital twins and why are they important? (20 min)

• Florence Hudson, Executive Director, Northeast Big Data Innovation Hub

9:30 AM – 10:45 AM: Current Clinical Uses I: How are DTs now being used in clinical care, and what clinical, provider, patient, regulatory, ethical or legal challenges arise? (75 min)

• Moderator: Florence Hudson, Executive Director, Northeast Big Data Innovation Hub (in-person)
• Dan Isaacs, GM & CTO of the Digital Twin Consortium, Chief Strategy Officer, Object Management Group (in-person)
• Eric Stahlberg, Executive Administrative Director for the Institute for Data Science in Oncology at MD Anderson Cancer Center (in-person)
• Grace Peng, Director of Mathematical Modeling, Simulation and Analysis, National Institute of Biomedical Imaging and Bioengineering (NIBIB) within the National Institutes of Health (virtual)
• Chakra Chennubhotia, Associate Professor of Computational and Systems Biology, University of Pittsburgh, Chief Executive Officer, PredxBio, Inc. (virtual)

10:45 AM – 11:00 AM:  Break

11:00 AM – 12:30 PM: Clinical Uses II and Clinician Perspectives (90 min)

• Moderator: Charles E. Binkley, Director of AI Ethics and Quality, Hackensack Meridian Health; Associate Professor of Surgery, Hackensack Meridian School of Medicine; and Lecturer in Bioethics, School of Professional Studies, Columbia University (in-person)
• Nancy Lee, MD, Radiation Oncologist and Early Drug Development Specialist, Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center (virtual)
• Kristin Myers, Associate Professor of Mechanical Engineering, Columbia Engineering (in-person)
• Martin Genet, Professor, Mechanics Department & Solid Mechanics Laboratory, École Polytechnique (in-person)
• Florence Doo, Assistant Professor, Diagnostic Radiology & Nuclear Medicine, University of Maryland School of Medicine; Director of Innovation, University of Maryland Medical Intelligent Imaging (UM2ii) Center; and Faculty, University of Maryland-Institute for Health Computing (UM-IHC) (virtual)
• Caroline Chung, Vice President and Chief Data & Analytics Officer and Co-Director of the Institute for Data Science in Oncology at MD Anderson Cancer Center (virtual)

12:30 PM – 1:30 PM: Lunch and Discussion (1 hour)

1:30 PM – 3:30 PM: Other Stakeholder Perspectives (2 hours)

• Moderator: Robert Klitzman, Professor of Psychiatry (in Sociomedical Sciences), Columbia University Irving Medical Center; Program Director, Bioethics Program, School of Professional Studies, Columbia University (in-person)
• Orlando Lopez, Director of the NIDCR Dental, Oral, and Craniofacial (DOC) Biomaterials, Devices, and Clinical Technologies Program, Division of Extramural Research (virtual)
• Matthias Braun, Director of the Department of Social Ethics, University of Bonn (virtual)
• Nancy Berlinger, Senior Research Scholar, The Hastings Center for Bioethics (in-person)
• Glenn Cohen, James A. Atwood and Leslie Williams Professor of Law; Deputy Dean of Harvard Law School; Faculty Director of the Petrie-Flom Center for Health Law Policy, Biotechnology & Bioethics at Harvard (in-person)
• Jodyn Platt, Associate Professor of Learning Health Sciences, Medical School Associate Professor of Health Management and Policy, School of Public Health, University of Michigan Medical School (in-person)
• Sean Whiteley, Founder, Axomem Private Limited (virtual)

3:30 PM – 3:45 PM:  Break

3:45 PM – 5:00 PM: Open Discussion, Future Directions, and Next Steps (1 hour, 15 min)

5:00 PM: Event Ends

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Speaker Details

Listed in order of program:

Talk Title: Toward Pulmonary Mechanical Digital Twins

Abstract: The development of “digital twins” in healthcare offers significant opportunities to understand and treat complex conditions like Idiopathic Pulmonary Fibrosis (IPF), a progressive disease that severely alters lung structure and mechanics. This presentation outlines our framework for building pulmonary mechanical digital twins by bridging routine clinical imaging, such as 3D CT scans, with physics-based biomechanical modeling. Through a dedicated personalization pipeline, we tailor these virtual models to reflect an individual patient’s unique lung, mapping both shape, healthy and diseased regions, motion, etc., to non-invasively estimate potential biomarkers—like regional tissue compliance and localized physical stresses—that cannot be directly measured in the clinic. By simulating this complex mechanical environment, we aim to investigate whether physical stresses actively drive IPF progression and, ultimately, provide clinicians with powerful new virtual tools for earlier diagnosis, accurate prognoses, and highly personalized respiratory care.

Talk Title: Deploying Digital Twins: Impacts on Accountability and Patient Autonomy 

Abstract: Digital twins promise to leverage complex data analytics to innovate patient care well beyond current capabilities. As a dynamic technology, ethical evaluation and governance systems will also need to adapt. Applying ecological models of evaluation and emerging lessons-learned from the impact of AI can inform approaches to development and deployment of digital twins. Drawing on research with patients about the use of AI in their care, critical ethical issues will be explored. Examining the issue of autonomy provides an example of how systems will need to change to incorporate digital twins and related technologies in ways that ensure trustworthiness and benefit to people and institutions.

Talk Title: From Building to Bedside: Digital Twins, Data Fusion, and the Hard Questions

Abstract: Hospital digital twins are increasingly discussed as tools for individual patient monitoring, but infectious disease surveillance demands something fundamentally different: a twin that models both the patient and the population simultaneously. One patient’s multi-drug-resistant organism colonisation affects every other patient on the ward, every staff member, every visitor, and potentially the broader community. This dual nature — patient-specific and group-impacting — creates ethical and legal tensions that single-patient digital twin frameworks were never designed to address.

Drawing on five years of building operational digital twins for hospital infection surveillance in Singapore, this talk presents three concrete projects spanning large-scale pathogen surveillance, AI risk prediction with anonymised training data, and edge video capture for ward monitoring. Each project surfaces distinct challenges at the intersection of clinical benefit, data protection, and public health obligation. The surveillance system fuses lab results, patient movements, spatial context, and temporal patterns across entire hospital campuses, while edge video analytics using vision-language models raises the sharpest questions about the boundary between routine monitoring and evidence with entirely different legal obligations.

The talk confronts four unresolved challenges: the free-rider problem in public health data, where individuals withdraw consent but continue to benefit from collective surveillance; the tension between pandemic preparedness and purpose-limitation principles; the regulatory ambiguity of when a digital twin becomes a medical device; and the problem of inadvertent data classification escalation, where operational data unexpectedly acquires legal or ethical obligations it was never designed to carry. A central question is the “peacetime-to-wartime” transition — at what national alert level does the ethical calculus shift from protecting individual anonymity to identifying and tracing for community safety, and who makes that call?