By Khalida Sarwari
A pair of Harker School students returned from Washington, D.C., with a $20,000 check for developing a machine that improves the diagnosis of breast cancer.
David Zhu of Saratoga and Evani Radiya-Dixit of San Jose presented their prize-winning work at the Siemens Competition in Math, Science and Technology hosted at George Washington University Dec. 4-8, earning fifth-place honors.
“We really didn’t know how we would rank because all of the projects were so good,” said David, a 16-year-old junior at Harker who has aspirations of pursuing a career in computer engineering. “It was a really exciting opportunity.”
In their project, titled “Automated Classification of Benign and Malignant Proliferative Breast Cancer Lesions,” David and Evani developed a machine-learning algorithm, an algorithm that learns from data and can diagnose a breast cancer tumor as either benign or malignant from a biopsy image. This development appears to have far-reaching implications; for one, it can help improve the accuracy of breast cancer diagnoses, potentially reducing disproportionate treatment.
“This model can reduce the chance of misdiagnosis and ensure that patients at risk of breast cancer will get the proper treatment,” said David.
David and Evani worked on the project for one year, doing the bulk of the work mostly over the summer at a lab at Harvard Medical School in Boston.
“I wanted to apply my knowledge of computers to a field that’s actively being explored and I thought since cancer research is a really hot topic right now, it’d be great to apply my knowledge to cancer and breast cancer,” said David.
The most challenging part of the project for the duo was designing the algorithm so it would achieve a high accuracy rate of cancer diagnosis and making sure they remained unbiased, so that their results could be replicated.
Outside of school, David participates in tennis, basketball and dance and plays piano and percussion instruments. His role models are Steve Jobs and Alan Turing. Two years ago he competed in the Northern California State MathCounts, a national middle school coaching and competitive mathematics competition.
With her free time, Evani, who’s also a junior at Harker, volunteers at Sacred Heart Community Service and enjoys running and playing tennis as well as writing and singing.
The pair aren’t anywhere near done with their project, continuing to tinker away in their school lab any chance they get.
“We’re currently working on expanding our model to all types of cancer, not just breast cancer,” David said.
This is the 16th year the Siemens Foundation has helds its competition, which allows students to achieve national recognition for science research projects that they complete in high school.
Link: Pair of Harker students win $20k for breast cancer diagnosis machine
