Nyambura Sallinen
8th Grade, Lanier Middle School
Sugar Hill, GA
Nyambura and her teammate Keshvee Sekhda developed a mobile app prototype called IdentiCan to identify breast, lung and skin cancer.
IdentiCan: The App That Detects Breast, Lung and Skin Cancer
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Project Background
“Cancer is a huge problem in our world that has touched millions of lives,” Nyambura says. Her own friends and family members have been affected by cancer, she notes. Nyambura is also interested in going into the medical field so she and her teammate, Keshvee Sekhda, started looking into how artificial intelligence might help. They soon learned how crucial it has become in society and how much it can accomplish. “We automatically knew that we want to combat this problem by using these modern advancements,” Nyambura says.
Tactics and Results
Nyambura and Keshvee developed a mobile app prototype called IdentiCan to identify breast, lung and skin cancer. They trained a machine learning algorithm to recognize these cancers using more than 8,000 photos and health scan images of each cancer type. For lung cancer, the teammates also included audio clips of people with cancer and other respiratory diseases so the algorithm could learn to tell the difference. The system also accounts for family history, medical history and other relevant health information. Within the app, a user would be able to upload their information, images and sound clips, and it will return the likelihood of them having cancer. When testing several sample trials simulating a user, IdentiCan accurately identified cancer 94.3 percent of the time. “In the future, Nyambura says they want to “collect more feedback from… professionals and hospitals,” and hopes to one day be able to legally test their app with humans.
Beyond the Project
In the future, Nyambura hopes to one day be able to legally test their app with humans. She and her teammate would also like it to identify more forms of cancer, increase accuracy and use more advanced technologies for better diagnoses.
Other interests
Nyambura enjoys piano, violin, robotics and soccer. But her favorite hobby is dance, “Dancing has always been a passion for me,” she says. “What I truly love is that you get to tell a story through your movements.” She hopes to become a neurosurgeon one day. “I find how the brain functions really intriguing,” Nyambura says.
