Two friends of mine, Shibani Kansara and David Chi, along with myself -Mayank Tahilramani, have collaborated this year to create a team project and plan on entering it under the Medical Health category of Intel’s international science convention. This project is centered around a computer ‘program’ that we are currently devising that is a predictor model on cancerous tumor growth in live tissue. The whole project is divided into two sections: Medical Aspect (the application of our theory) and the Mathematical/Programming aspect (the theory itself). The theory/main idea(s) as of May- June 2009 is/are listed below, but please note, this is a rough outlined version of what we are proposing.
As you read the description and our thought process at much more depth at the About page, you may realize that obtaining such ambitious goals requires a variety of resources that mainly research institutions hold to their disposal or public commercial medical institutions like hospitals and veterinary clinics, but the concern is not the availability of such resources, for they are daily used commercially to diagnose illnesses. Rather, the mere obtaining of permission with guidance to those resources is what we would appreciate. In specific, a CT scanner is in of desperate need to accomplish our goals and obtaining the medical images we need. We plan on centering our experimentation on mice or rats and analyze the growth of tumors induced, most likely in the lung with the use of specific carcinogen, under the supervision of a research institution. Since it is on a group of rats and we need progression of cancer development in tissue to verify the program’s effectiveness, monthly scans of 3 or more groups of rats is required. Sadly, at the moment we have reached a point in the process of initiating this project that we no longer are able to continue progress until we have reached a consensus on which resources we have to our utility, until then can we determine which route to pursue in collecting the biological data we need, adequately and appropriately for the mathematical model we intend on creating. We have personal equipment and software that will analyze raw data and manipulate medical images (the medical standard DICOM archives) but, understandably, not the capability to collect the raw images like those taken by CT scanners. For this reason we ask you for aid and donation in any form, most preferably permission and access to monthly scans of designated rats, that may help us to our goals and achieve a better understanding. Your donations and aid will be very appreciated and recognized; we intend to proudly display the people do helped make this project possible by recognizing them on our on our backboard display at International Science and Engineering Fair and any other applicable places to increase publicity of great corporations willing to help independent research.
We are located in Atlanta, Georgia sub-urban region, and are hopeful that someone out there is motivated, intrigued, and generous enough to meet our needs and grant us permission to taking monthly CT’s of our rats.
Please, for further clarification and in depth analysis on this student project, visit the about page located at the top of this page and other the sister sites located on the ‘Blogroll’ to the side of this page. To contact any of us individually, please email us for our phone numbers and we will be more than happy to respond. If you would like to meet us in person, that would be wonderful as well.
My contact information by email is Devataa@gmail.com. I am looking forward to interacting with anyone and discussing more about our project. Thank you for your interest and time to consider this idea of ours.
