Aniketh Bandlamudi first considered the idea for an application that can help identify signs of oral cancer when he was in eighth grade. But at the time, he didn’t have the resources he felt were necessary to execute the idea.

But last May, he met Vishal Manikanden at a robotics competition, and pitched him the idea. Now a junior at Oakton High School in Fairfax County, Virginia, the pair teamed up with Malek Swilam and Lauren Kim to create what they call “ OCRadar .”

The app, Bandlamudi said, allows users with a phone or other smart device to take a generalized picture of their mouth. Then, it scans that image and produces information about whether there is a cancerous tumor inside.

“Oral cancer has been a really prominent cancer, with millions of cases every single year worldwide,” Bandlamudi said. “Yet there hasn’t been any accessible solutions that anyone from their own home could use, and the traditional methods of scanning require a hospital visit, plus a lot of money. A lot of places around the world, they just don’t have access to such resources.”

The group started with an iOS application, but then realized Android phones are more prevalent in other countries, so they launched plans for an Android app too. The tech is also available as a web application, so anyone who has a camera and internet connection will be able to use it.

The app uses artificial intelligence and compares a user’s image to thousands of images of mouths that are healthy, and others that have benign and malignant tumors.

The subset of AI, called computer vision, helps the technology differentiate between cancerous and non-cancerous tumors.

They’re working on getting FDA approval, Kim said, “which will help us be able to put the app onto the App Store and the Play Store.” That process also requires a certain level of medical certification.

Their product, Bandlamudi said, wasn’t designed as a diagnosis tool. Instead, he said, it’s made to be a software that is “there to aid users in detecting and being more aware of what could happen.”

Designing an app that specifically identifies signs of oral cancer “means that we can reach more people, and help a lot more people than we could have reached with something like skin cancer,” Bandlamudi said.

The app and website will be free, Bandlamudi said.

They’re hoping it will “enable people to be diagnosed earlier in early-stage cancer situations, rather than waiting later on when it can be lethal,” Bandlamudi said.

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