17 Year Old Girl Codes to Google Win

Brittany Wenger, a high-school senior, is well on her way to making the diagnosis of breast cancer less painful and more accurate. Wenger began studying neural networks when she was in the seventh grade. And this year, she won the grand prize in the 2012 Google Science Fair for her project, “Global Neural Network Cloud Service for Breast Cancer.” The resulting Cloud4Cancer service aggregates data from biopsies done with the fine-needle aspiration process, instead of the traditional and more painful surgical option. The goal of Wenger’s network is to ensure that fine-needle aspiration biopsies are as accurate as traditional biopsies, which would allow more women to be diagnosed and treated early. In preliminary trials, the service has achieved 99.11 percent sensitivity to malignancy, and its over 7.6 million trials have demonstrated the network improves as more data is deposited. And because it is delivered as a cloud service, Cloud4Cancer is built to support usage by every hospital in the world.