‘Hacking Cancer’, students provide solutions to docs

A hackathon to provide solutions to problems faced by oncologists was held over three days at Idea Café in Marena here, recently.

Kasturba Medical College (KMC) Research Cell and Manipal Comprehensive Cancer Care Centre (MCCCC) in collaboration with the Innovation Centre of Manipal Academy of Higher Education (MAHE) organised the first-of-its-kind Hackathon in the country to mark the first anniversary of MCCCC.

The event, Hacking Cancer, attracted both undergraduate and postgraduate students from all institutes of MAHE (KMC Manipal and Mangaluru, MCODS Manipal and Mangaluru, MCOPS, SOLS and MIT).

The problem statements included the need for blood donation, guide for Acute Lymphocytic Leukemia (ALL) patients and requirement of low-cost radiation oncology devices.

The participants were divided into teams based on shared interests in order to develop the solution model.

At the conclusion of the problem-solving block, each of the teams presented their solution to a panel of expert judges— Dr Vedang Murthy, Dr Mamta Manglani, Dr Anil Paleri, Dr Chenappa Patil, Dr Manish Bhandare and Sandesh Manik.

Best teams

The three best teams declared winners are “ALL Better” which proposed tracking and boosting patient compliance by using simple data entry and record system.

The team comprised Arushi Bhura, Fiza Jakhar, Shreyak Sehgal and Rahul Kondaveti all from KMC, Mangaluru.

The other team, “Donate Blood” had proposed an idea of creating an application for saving lives and increasing the voluntary blood donation by linking it with social media.

The team members are Shreya Joshi-KMC Manipal, Disha Jindal-KMC Mangaluru, Sanskritie Sashikanth KMC-Mangaluru, Reuben Nellissery and Sushant Prabhu from MIT.

And the third team, ‘’Lumi Flex’’, had developed an illuminating flexible abdominal retractor with the light source and manually adjusted tip.

The team comprised Shreya Lakshim, Garima Makhija, Namrata Datta (All MCODS Manipal) and Rahul Mendiratta from MIT.