Digital Twin Hearts Achieve 100% Arrhythmia Success

Personalized cardiac models help doctors target and treat life-threatening heart rhythm disorders with greater precision and effectiveness.

Apr. 2, 2026 at 8:03am

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In the first clinical trials for cardiac digital twins technology, researchers at Johns Hopkins University created digital replicas of patients' hearts, then tested procedures on those twins before performing them on the real thing. Working with digital twins resulted in faster and significantly more accurate procedures that reduced recurrences of arrythmias for patients, compared to traditional methods.

Why it matters

Cardiac digital twins represent a breakthrough in personalized medicine, allowing doctors to diagnose, treat and predict outcomes for patients with life-threatening heart rhythm disorders with unprecedented precision. This approach could transform the standard of care for conditions like ventricular tachycardia, which are difficult to treat effectively using traditional methods.

The details

The study, published in the New England Journal of Medicine, demonstrated the safety, feasibility and promising outcomes of the digital twin approach. For each of the 10 participants, the team created a personalized 3D digital model of the patient's heart based on MRI scans. They then used the digital twins to identify the precise areas sparking the arrhythmias and plan the optimal ablation procedure. The streamlined ablations guided by the digital twin predictions were 100% successful in eliminating the arrhythmias, compared to a 60% long-term success rate with traditional ablation.

  • The TWIN-VT clinical trial was approved by the FDA.
  • The study was published in the New England Journal of Medicine on April 2, 2026.

The players

Johns Hopkins University

The research institution where the cardiac digital twin technology was developed and tested.

Jonathan Chrispin

A cardiologist at Johns Hopkins who specializes in treating arrhythmias and was the first author on the study.

Natalia Trayanova

The Murray B. Sacks professor of Biomedical Engineering at Johns Hopkins, whose team developed the digital twin technology used in the clinical trial.

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What they’re saying

“For patients, digital twins can be life-changing and life-saving. We show we can make their procedures safer, shorter and more effective by targeting only the critical portions of the heart.”

— Jonathan Chrispin, Cardiologist, Johns Hopkins University

“In the patient's digital twin, we can try different scenarios for treatment before we treat the actual patient and provide the treating physician with the best, most optimal scenario, minimizing damage to the heart, and increasing the potential for a successful treatment. The digital twin allows us to address all potential sources of arrythmias that may not be seen by clinical interrogation. We exhaust all possibilities.”

— Natalia Trayanova, Murray B. Sacks Professor of Biomedical Engineering, Johns Hopkins University

What’s next

The research team expects to further test cardiac digital twins in a larger clinical trial and work to make the technology accessible on a desktop, which would get the information to doctors in minutes. They also plan to expand the technology to work with other cardiac diseases.

The takeaway

Cardiac digital twins represent a breakthrough in personalized medicine, allowing doctors to diagnose, treat and predict outcomes for patients with life-threatening heart rhythm disorders with unprecedented precision. This approach could transform the standard of care for conditions like ventricular tachycardia that are difficult to treat effectively using traditional methods.