The role of standards in defining an ecosystem for Virtual Human Twins (VHTs)

The European EDITH infrastructure is building a whole ecosystem for Virtual Human Twins (VHTs) in healthcare. This requires interoperability of the data and computational models constructed based on these data, and thus, a high degree of standardization of data and models, as well as applied workflows, modelling approaches and provenance information for traceability. Such standards are defined by initiatives of the scientific community, such as COMBINE, GA4GH and others, as well as by formal Standard Defining Organizations (SDOs), such as ISO with their technical committees. We introduce the different classes of standards used for EDITH, such as data standards, modelling standards, imaging standards, process and workflow standards, quality standards, provenance standards, biosignal standards and standards for phenotypic data.