TWIN: Personalized Clinical Trial Digital Twin Generation

Clinical trial digital twins are virtual patients that reflect personal characteristics in a high degree of granularity and can be used to simulate various patient outcomes under different conditions. With the growth of clinical trial databases captured by Electronic Data Capture (EDC) systems, there is a growing interest in using machine learning models to generate digital twins. This can benefit the drug development process by reducing the sample size required for participant recruitment, improving patient outcome predictive modeling, and mitigating privacy risks when sharing synthetic clinical trial data. However, prior research has mainly focused on generating Electronic Healthcare Records (EHRs), which often assume large training data and do not account for personalized synthetic patient record generation. In this paper, we propose a sample-efficient method TWIN for generating personalized clinical trial digital twins. TWIN can produce digital twins of patient-level clinical trial records with high fidelity to the targeting participant's record and preserves the temporal relations across visits and events. We compare our method with various baselines for generating real-world patient-level clinical trial data. The results show that TWIN generates synthetic trial data with high fidelity to facilitate patient outcome predictions in low-data scenarios and strong privacy protection against real patients from the trials.