Three students from Atkins High School in Winston-Salem are heading to Washington, D.C., as national finalists in the Presidential AI Challenge National Championship for their innovative project using artificial intelligence to diagnose Parkinson’s disease through voice analysis and drawings.
Luis Cruz-Mondragon, Andrew Shih, and Jerrin Moore developed the tool to address challenges in diagnosing Parkinson’s disease, particularly in rural areas where access to specialists is limited.
“Everybody else is focusing right now on MRI as data,” Cruz-Mondragon said. “I want to try something that wasn’t traditional and that would include drawings as well as audio recordings as the actual data.”
An MRI can be prohibitively expensive, and many rural communities lack specialists who can diagnose Parkinson’s disease. The students’ AI tool aims to bridge this gap.
“What really struck me as the main issue was they just didn’t have access,” Shih said. “Even if you had trembling hands and speech disorders or anything like the hallmark signs of Parkinson’s, then you couldn’t really do anything if you were in these rural areas.”
The team utilized existing technology, adapting a convolutional neural network (CNN) to suit their needs.
“So basically, we’re using existing technology, a CNN convolutional neural network. That’s already a thing that exists. We are basically just morphing it in a way that it can actually be used in making minor tweaks to the actual architecture,” Moore said.
The students will present their project to a panel of judges, competing against four other teams from across the country. Each team has five minutes to present, followed by a question-and-answer session. If they win, they will each receive $10,000 and the prestige of being national champions.
“And it’s amazing that we also get to help people along the way,” Moore said. “Like we’re not just doing this, because we also get to use this and potentially twist this into a project that can be used to help people in the places that we live.”
Win or lose, these Atkins High School students are among the brightest innovators in the country.
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