Badass-In-Training Brittany Wenger Hacks Breast-Cancer Diagnosis Into Something Better With Neural-Networks And Geek POWAH!

+Oh, and also: She’s a 17-year-old high-school junior and winner of this year’s Google Science Fair Grand Prize.

As if that weren’t enough, BW tried out a bunch of commercially-available Neural Networks and decided they just weren’t accurate enough.

So, spurred-on by the difficulties one of her cousins was going through, she just picked up a programming textbook, taught herself Java and Built Her Own Damn Neural-Network.

-Which was of-course better than the ones built by pros.

And since that wasn’t a challenge enough, Brittany decided to use it to decipher data from the Least-Accurate but also least-invasive type of test.

And by “Least Accurate”, I mean: “Least Accurate Until Brittany Wenger Showed Up”.

Using about 700 samples of publicly-available data and algorithms designed to recognize differences and patterns too small and complex for humans to pick up, she raised the accuracy on TNA-type tests to 99.11%-and-rising.

Still more important than that is her system is specifically-weighted to remove the most dangerous type of test-results: The False Negative.

She has left her project up online so that physicians can add more data to it, so that the system can continue to learn and increase its accuracy with time.

For her efforts and her Grand-Prize win, Brittany gets a $50k Scholarship, an Internship, and a 10-Day-Trip to the Galapagos Islands.

The knowledge that she can bench-press your kid’s Baking Soda Volcano Project with both arms tied behind her back?

-Priceless.

+PS: The 15 Career Awards she has already racked up prior to the GSF-GP make it seem like sending Brittany Wenger into a fight against Breast Cancer is like that Lone Gurkha who ended up in a fight against 30 Afghan Terrorists awhile back.

-It just seems unfair to Breast Cancer and the Afghans, doesn’t it?

AYO GORKHALI, Brittany!!!

Hit up the links for more details:

JUMP BONUS!: The Mighty Google has made their own Neural Network.
It recognizes cat videos. NYT-GoogleCats

Photo Credits: “The holy graal in Turin”, by Rodolfo Belloli

Links:
• Source: Brittany Wenger’s Winning Project at Google