it all started in the summer of 2017
when I went to visit my brother in
Boston and there I learned about some
research that was happening and the
surprisingly low statistics about
pancreatic cancer like its survival rate
my name is Rishabh Jain I'm in eighth
grade 13 years old from Portland Oregon
and I created an artificial intelligence
based tool called PC DLS net to improve
pancreas tracking during a treatment
called radiotherapy for pancreatic
cancer the 5-year survival rate of
pancreatic cancer is around 9% and the
10-year survival rate is around 1% which
is extremely low and these survival
rates have not improved significantly in
the past 40 years so currently
pancreatic cancer is detected in a late
stage and by then doctors try to use
radiotherapy to help treat it but most
of the time it's not effective enough so
I got inspired to do some research on
this because I'm a big programmer and I
like artificial intelligence so I
wondered if I could combine my knowledge
in the two areas to help solve the
problem and I created an artificial
intelligence based tool called PC DLS
net to improve pancreas tracking during
a treatment called radiotherapy for
pancreatic cancer
I contacted over 253 doctors and got
around like 30 replies from leading
experts from institutions at cancer
centers and around the world so as you
can see in the pancreas right here
there's other organs such as the stomach
and liver that may cover the area and
also it's right below the lungs causing
it to move during some of the treatments
it's also very hard to reach in it's
right in the center of the abdomen next
to the spinal cord so for surgery
biopsies other things like that it may
be hard to find where the pancreas is it
sometimes detailed as a mushy or angry
organ because of its position in the
body this right here is a real patient
CT scan
and as you can see throughout it's
transforming it's very hard for the
human eye to detect where the pancreas
is and this is especially a problem in
real time when radiologists and
oncologists have to find the pancreas
and apply radiation treatment so over
here on the left side my tool can be run
to find where exactly the pancreas is in
one of these CT or MRI slices and output
this result instantaneously so currently
doctors can have to apply sometimes a
seven millimeter overlay
around the pancreas of radiation and
this can affect millions of healthy
cells so my tool is able to reduce that
area to around four millimeters so that
saves millions of healthy cells and can
improve patient quality of care so I
have a detailed five-year plan about how
I wanna globally commercialize my tool
PC DLS net and improve pancreatic cancer
survival rates so I envision partnering
with the hospital as well as 3m to work
and create my tool as an add-on and for
this I'll need to conduct clinical
testing so I want to gain FDA and IRB
approval
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so I want to continue pursuing medicine
and engineering as I grow up so for my
undergraduate degree I'm thinking about
becoming a biomedical engineer and later
I want to make a difference in other
people's lives I've gotten to see
firsthand some of my relatives who are
doctors and how they can perform surgery
or make other treatments that improve
the quality of care and solve problems
for people in need so I'm thinking about
becoming a surgeon and continuing
medical research as I grew up