17-year-old girl builds artificial ‘brain’ to detect breast cancer

Source: futureoftech.msnbc.msn.com via Leo on Pinterest

The world thinks cancer diseases are here to stay - no cure has been found to fight it.

The world thinks that 17-year old girls are innocent, carefree all-about-me people.

The world thinks wrong - or so I thought, as I came across the story via Pinterest of Brittany Wenger. She's from Florida and she won the grand prize in the Google Science Fair for making a computer program that can 99.1% diagnose breast cancer. She beat 30 finalists from all over the world.

Brittany spent 600 hours (or 3 months if compared to the average Philippine office schedule) to code this science project. It uses tissue samples to assess signs of breast cancer. Read more about her winning work here.

Brittany used artificial intelligence programming running on Java language, a growing trend in the software development industry which trains the computer to think like humans - they can detect patterns that are too complex, and gets better with more data used. The program is deployed on the cloud.

As the grand winner, Brittany brings home US$50,000 scholarship money, an internship with an IT company and a 10-day trip to the Galapagos Island in South America.

More about this story:
MSNBC
Huffington Post
Cloud4Cancer Breast Cancer Detection