17 year old develops artificial brain to diagnose cancer

Although it is not the typical subject that makes the news here at eTeknix, we thought it was well worth the mention as its nothing short of inspiring. A 17 year old female from Florida, Brittany Wenger, has spent the last few years of her life developing an artificial brain that can help with the diagnosis of cancer. Using various computer-programming languages, Brittany Wenger created a cloud-based artificial neural network that can assess tissue samples for signs of breast cancer.

The artificial neural network has data collected from 7.6 million trials, and according to Wenger, the Java-based artificial brain is 99.1 percent sensitive to malignancy.

We really can’t express how brilliant her work is – Wenger’s network is 4.97 percent more sensitive to malignancy than three other commercially available networks (and these cost hospitals thousands if not millions every year from medical companies). Wenger is aiming to deploy her network in hospitals and extend her dataset to include other cancers.

“It will require a little bit of coding and tweaking, but it would be very easy to adapt it so it could diagnose other types of cancer and potentially other medical problems,” said the 17-year-old whiz kid.

As a reward for her works she recently won first place in the Google Science Fair project, and she was awarded a $50,000 scholarship, an internship with the sponsor, and a 10-day trip to the Galapagos Islands. We all hope that she gets something out of this, since if Hospitals already pay for this kind of medical software then she sure deserves Royalties for her hard and inspiring work.

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