Girl Programs Artificial 'Brain' to Diagnose Breast Cancer

A high school junior has created a computer brain that can diagnose breast cancer with 99 percent sensitivity. Seventeen-year-old Brittany Wenger of Sarasota, Fla., wrote a breast cancer-diagnosing app based on an artificial neural network, basically a computer program whose structure is inspired by the way brain cells connect with one another. She won grand prize at the Google Science Fair for her invention in ceremony held in Palo Alto, Calif. Like other artificial intelligence programs, artificial neural networks "learn" what to do by analyzing examples they're given and they perform better if they get more examples. In addition, they're able to detect patterns in data that are too complex for human brains or other types of programs to analyze.