Two teenagers from the city — Sidharth Jain and Aasimm Khan — have won the prestigious Microsoft Imagine Cup award in the junior category of World Solutions Using Artificial Intelligence (AI) for developing a system to detect genital skin cancer. The 17-year-olds, who have bagged the award in the AI for Humanitarian Action category, have applied to patent their Remote Identification and Detection of Genital Skin Cancer — RIDGE product.

Speaking about the system, Sidharth said, “We developed a machine-learning model, executed and deployed it as a mobile app. In this, the image of the lesion is processed and fed into our Deep Convolutional Neural Network (DCNN) — trained and tested with 5,000 images — yielding a percentage probability report of the lesion being classified as malignant, benign or premalignant. If malignant, it is further classified within the five main skin cancers with an accuracy of 83 per cent on confusion matrix.”