Much as a pilot might practice maneuvers in a flight simulator, scientists might soon be able to perform experiments on a realistic simulation of the mouse brain. In a new study, Stanford Medicine researchers and collaborators used an artificial intelligence model to build a “digital twin” of the part of the mouse brain that processes visual information.

The digital twin was trained on large datasets of brain activity collected from the visual cortex of real mice as they watched movie clips. It could then predict the response of tens of thousands of neurons to new videos and images. Digital twins could make studying the inner workings of the brain easier and more efficient. If you build a model of the brain and it’s very accurate, that means you can do a lot more experiments.

The ones that are the most promising you can then test in the real brain.The lead author of the study is Eric Wang, PhD, a medical student at Baylor College of Medicine. Unlike previous AI models of the visual cortex, which could simulate the brain’s response to only the type of stimuli they saw in the training data, the new model can predict the brain’s response to a wide range of new visual input. It can even surmise anatomical features of each neuron.

Source: https://med.stanford.edu/news/all-news/2025/04/digital-twin.html