Podcast: Teenager Designs Neural Net App to Detect Breast Cancer

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In this podcast from NPR’s The Takeaway program, 17-year-old Brittany Wenger describes how she won the Google Science Fair 2012 with a cloud-powered, neural net application designed to help doctors diagnose breast cancer.

Wenger noticed that the results from one of the least invasive biopsies, the fine-needle aspiration, were the most inconclusive. She worked to design a system that would analyze the samples more intelligently. “I created a tool for doctors to use that could detect patterns in these fine-needle aspirates that are too complex for humans to detect so that it could provide doctors with this way to determine whether masses are malignant or benign without all the invasion,” Wenger says.

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