The app uses AI to help reduce cost and access barriers to health care.
Two Greater Richmond high schoolers are using their coding skills to help people detect cancer, and they’re attracting national attention for their efforts.
Saket Sambaraju, 16, and Abhinav Gitta, 17, longtime friends and high school juniors from Glen Allen, were selected as winners in the 2024 Congressional App Challenge, which challenges middle and high school students to “code for Congress.” The students were selected to represent Virginia’s 4th Congressional District during the April #HouseOfCode event in Washington, DC.
The annual contest asks students interested in science, technology, engineering and math to create an original app that could be used on a phone, PC, tablet, web browser or robot.
Gitta, who attends Deep Run High School’s Center for Information Technology, had been waiting to participate in the competition for years. “At Deep Run, as part of the Center for Information Technology, it’s a really popular thing,” Gitta said. “When I was in 11th grade, I decided we could work on this together.”
The two students have known each other since second grade. They had similar interests — even sharing a chess coach. They stayed close despite attending different high schools, connecting over their interests in computer science and artificial intelligence.
They decided to work together on the challenge, experimenting with AI to make a positive impact on their community. Sambaraju, who attends Maggie L. Walker Governor’s School in Richmond, was inspired by the death of his grandfather, who lived in a small community in India and died from melanoma.
“He was in a rural place where they didn’t get checkups yearly from the doctor. As a result, he passed away,” Sambaraju said. “We wanted to create an application that helped people in these rural areas that didn’t have access to doctors to check on melanoma and make sure that it’s not malignant.”
The teens trained their app, MelanomAI, to recognize malignant melanoma by uploading over 17,000 images of moles that were diagnosed as either malignant or non-cancerous.
“We found it had a 92.28% testing accuracy, which was really amazing,” Sambarju said.
The app also provides education materials about skin cancer and can connect users with nearby hospitals. Submissions were due in November 2024; the following month, they received a phone call from US Rep. Jennifer McClellan (D–4th).
“When she called, we were really nervous, and then she told us the amazing news,” Sambaraju said. “Then she started asking us about our motivation for the app and where we wanted to go to college and our future. That was really inspiring.”
In an interview with VPM News, McClellan said she’s amazed what students are able to do with technology. “What really stood out to me about them is how they took tragedy and turned it into helping other people,” McClellan said. “I am always really touched by people who get rooted in ‘I want to help people,’ especially when they’re turning that personal tragedy into something positive.”
Sambaraju and Gitta reached out to medical professionals to explore ways of expanding their dataset and improving the application’s accuracy before releasing it to the public. They hope to eventually make the technology available through the Apple and Google app stores.
The Congressional App Challenge launched its 2025 contest on May 1. The deadline for students to register and submit their online application is Oct. 30.
