HALO wins Rep. Katie Porter’s 2022 Congressional App Challenge in California’s 45th District

When asked what inspired the creation of HALO, the student said, ”Each year, over 300,000 people are diagnosed with central nervous system cancers worldwide. My family has struggled with cancer after losing a relative to Glioblastoma, so my goal is to make healthcare information resources more accessible to doctors and patients around the world who deal with CNS cancers as well.

Although there have been major advances in cancer detection through non-invasive methods such as MRI imaging, diagnosis and prognosis techniques are labor-intensive and inefficient. These are also not equally available to patients, physicians or hospitals in much of the developing world. This presents a promising field for technology-based solutions that can help automate the data processing and analysis of clinical information.

By training and deploying the classification and prognosis models on the cloud and making them accessible to researchers and physicians worldwide, I hope to contribute to the broader research community. Clinicians can enhance the models with patient data from different ethnicities and backgrounds, which will reduce prediction bias. HALO will also help achieve the two primary goals of President Joe Biden’s Cancer Moonshot Initiative: to reduce the cancer death rate by half within 25 years and improve the lives of people with cancer and cancer survivors. HALO will have a significant positive impact on faster, more accurate diagnosis and survival prognosis of cancer patients worldwide.”