A high school junior has created a computer brain that can
diagnose breast cancer with 99 percent sensitivity. Seventeen-
year-old Brittany Wenger of Sarasota, Fla., wrote a breast
cancer-diagnosing app based on an artificial neural network,
basically a computer program whose structure is inspired by the
way brain cells connect with one another. She won grand prize at
the Google Science Fair for her invention in ceremony held in
Palo Alto, Calif. last night (July 23). Like other artificial
intelligence programs, artificial neural networks "learn" what
to do by analyzing examples they're given and they perform
better if they get more examples. In addition, they're able to
detect patterns in data that are too complex for human brains or
other types of programs to analyze. Just this past June, Google
researchers built a neural network that learned to recognize
cats on the Internet without any outside input.