We are proud to announce the launch of Twinical, a startup born from research conducted within the MIMESIS team, with the mission of developing digital twins for soft-tissue surgical planning and navigation.
The challenge
Surgery remains the most effective approach for treating liver cancer, whether it originates within the liver itself or results from the spread of cancer cells — a scenario often seen in hepatic metastases. However, surgical plans are currently formulated based on static MRI or CT scan images, which provide only two-dimensional representations and can be challenging to interpret. During the operation itself, the liver deforms significantly as it is manipulated, making it difficult for the surgeon to keep track of tumour locations and critical vascular structures.
Our solution
Twinical develops medical software to optimize the surgical journey of patients diagnosed with liver cancer, providing surgeons with digital assistance during both the planning and execution phases of surgery.
Before surgery, Twinical creates high-fidelity 3D digital twins of the patient’s organ, allowing surgeons to understand the precise location of tumours and evaluate the complexity of the surgical resection. Medical teams can proactively design a surgical roadmap before the operation.
During the intervention, the surgeon’s vision is digitally augmented thanks to accurate, real-time, AI-powered simulation. This augmented reality framework effectively makes organs transparent, revealing inner anatomical details — including tumour positions and vascular structures — and showing how they evolve when the tissue is manipulated and deformed. As Professor Éric Vibert describes it: the digital twin serves as “a GPS guiding us to the optimal route.”
Three technological pillars
Twinical’s technology is built upon three foundations: physics-based simulation through digital twins using the SOFA framework developed at MIMESIS, real-time image acquisition to ensure the virtual model accurately tracks its physical counterpart, and artificial intelligence for enhanced decision support. The technology is designed to be compatible with surgical robots, further enhancing their 3D vision capabilities and restoring palpation cues through haptic feedback.
The team
The Twinical journey began in 2021, bringing together Mario Aricò (Ph.D. in surgical robotics), Stéphane Cotin (director of the MIMESIS research group at Inria), and Éric Vibert (AP-HP, founder of the BOPA Innovation Chair), who had been actively collaborating on digital twin research since 2019. The project entered the Inria Startup Studio in March 2022 for its maturation phase and was awarded the Grand Prix at the 24th national innovation competition (i-Lab) in June 2022. Twinical is supported by Inria Startup Studio, SATT Conectus, and AP-HP.
Learn more: Twinical on inria.fr
