By Khalida Sarwari
Rishab Gargeya is working on a project that can potentially bring a new level of eye care to millions of underserved people if brought to fruition. The best part? He appears to have already swayed Google judges.
Rishab, a 17-year-old Saratoga resident and Harker School senior, was recently named a regional finalist in the 2016 Google Science Fair, making him one of only 100 finalists worldwide who edged ahead of thousands of participants from more than 100 countries who entered their projects in the competition. It is Rishab’s first time entering the fair. He said he is grateful and honored to receive recognition for his work.
“I’m glad that others are also able to understand the impact vision-degenerative diseases have in underdeveloped regions,” he said.
Rishab’s project is one of the top 50 projects in the 16- to 18-year-old category, and according to Google, could potentially change the world. His project was a concept for developing a smartphone app that scans the retina for abnormalities, allowing for the early detection and curing of eye diseases such as diabetic retinopathy, macular degeneration and glaucoma that are known to cause permanent vision loss over time when left undiagnosed. His study develops a new smartphone-based diagnostic tool that can automatically detect any retinal abnormality within seconds.
“I hope this project can finally provide a low-cost, accessible solution for early detection of eye disease and blindness prevention,” he said.
Rishab started his project during a volunteer experience in his freshman year, where he shadowed ophthalmologists and retinal specialists in a free eye care clinic near his grandparents’ house in India.
“Through this experience, I learned of the disparity between the number of doctors available and the large number of patients that needed medical attention,” he said.
He returned with a desire and vision to create and deploy an automated solution to patient disease detection that could decrease the workload of doctors and allow any patient access to medical care. He emphasized that his application does not aim to replace clinicians or practicing doctors, but rather serves to aid and streamline current diagnostic workflows.
“My algorithm can act as an initial filter to distill a patient population into high-risk patients for further medical referral, rather than having specialists screen each patient individually,” Rishab said.
To learn more about Rishab’s app, visit his project page at goo.gl/WDL6Bk.
The winners of the Google Science Fair were scheduled to be announced on Aug. 11. Finalists are vying for a $50,000 scholarship.
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