This is the research work of Professor Amanda Randles of the Department of Biomedical Sciences at Duke University (USA) and received a prize worth 250,000 USD from the American Association for Computing Machinery.

Professor Randles has built a model with a smartwatch or similar device that would continuously feed data into a virtual simulation of your entire body, allowing doctors to closely monitor your health on a personalized level. This could effectively prevent and treat incurable diseases such as cancer, heart disease, etc.

With heart disease, doctors can non-invasively determine when a patient needs a stent to improve blood flow in the heart. With the “virtual friend,” doctors can predict how a patient’s heart will progress and respond to drug treatments. It can also help doctors assess the success rate of heart surgery before any decisions are made. The “virtual friend” can also help track cancer cells circulating in the blood, which can sometimes adapt to other parts of the body and form new tumors, known as metastasis.

Professor Randles is tracking how cancer cells move by changing different parameters, such as how the size of the cell's nucleus affects its movement.

When there is enough data about the characteristics of different cells and how they move, doctors can better predict how and where certain cancer cells will metastasize.