Chest Flow AI wins Rep. Michael Baumgartner’s 2025 Congressional App Challenge in Washington’s Fifth District.
Rep. Michael Baumgartner has named Chika Ugorji of Ferris High School as the winner of the 2025 Congressional App Challenge in Washington’s Fifth District. Their app Chest Flow AI uses transfer learning to fine-tune a DenseNet 121 model to analyze an image of a chest X-ray and instantly predict the probability of 14 common chest pathologies all at once.
When asked what inspired the creation of Chest Flow AI, Chika Ugorji said, “I was inspired by the challenge of diagnosing patients that are in very full and fast environments like the E.R. It’s very difficult for doctors to check for 14 different conditions all at once while being under immense pressure. My goal was to create an AI that can be the ultimate multitasking tool and check for all possible issues instantly. And even more crucially, I designed this model to be completely free and highly efficient. This can run on ANY basic laptop, takes less than a second, and its open sourced. This is critical because it allows this model to be used in smaller, underfunded clinics, where specialized AI tech can cost up to $20,000- $100,000+ just to have the tech to run it. This effectively makes my model 100% cheaper while having comparable evaluation metrics.”
The 2025 Congressional App Challenge marked another record-setting year for the program. A total of 394 Members of the U.S. House of Representatives hosted App Challenges in their congressional districts, the highest level of participation in the program’s history. More than 13,800 students from across the country participated, submitting over 4,600 original apps focused on real-world challenges ranging from health and accessibility to education, sustainability, and civic engagement.
The Congressional App Challenge is an official initiative of the U.S. House of Representatives that encourages middle school and high school students to learn to code, explore computer science, and build practical technology solutions for their communities. Each participating Member of Congress selects a winning app from their district, and winning teams are invited to showcase their projects to Members of Congress, staff, and industry leaders at the annual #HouseOfCode celebration on Capitol Hill.
The Challenge is proudly bipartisan and reflects a shared commitment to expanding access to STEM education and preparing the next generation of American innovators for the future workforce. The program is a public-private partnership made possible through funding from the Broadcom Foundation, AWS, Infosys Foundation USA, theCoderSchool, Apple, and others.
The 2026 Congressional App Challenge will launch in May, and eligible students can pre-register for the competition now.