From Vision to Victory: CarciScan Clinches 3rd Place at the 2024 Medical Grand Challenge

We are Team CarciScan! A passionate group of students from IMU, UM, and APU, united by our expertise in medicine and computer science. We’re thrilled to announce that we’ve secured 3rd place in the Medical Grand Challenge 2024!

The Medical Grand Challenge 2024 brought together participants from around the globe, pushing teams to identify unmet healthcare needs and collaborate across different disciplines.

Our project, CervAIcal Health, focuses on eliminating cervical cancer through early detection. By using cutting-edge AI technology, our solution addresses the challenges in cervical cancer screening and diagnosis, ultimately improving screening rates and reducing diagnostic time.

Our journey to success was not without challenges. One of the biggest challenges we faced was balancing our academic schedules with the tight deadlines for project submissions. As medical students, our semesters are filled with continuous exams, making it difficult to find time to focus on competition of tasks, especially with submissions due every 3-4 weeks. Stepping out of our comfort zones was another big challenge. While we medical students are more familiar with clinical studies, this competition pushed us to explore unfamiliar fields such as computer science, business and marketing, and digital health.

Despite these challenges, we persevered through mutual support, effective task delegation, and trust in each other. By recognising each team member’s unique strengths, we managed our challenges head-on, transforming hurdles into opportunities for growth and learning. This experience not only strengthened our bonds but also broadened our knowledge in different fields.

The experience, however, was incredibly rewarding. Not only did we complete this journey but we also experienced significant personal and professional growth. The MGC 2024 provided us a platform to enhance our public speaking skills as we pitched our ideas to diverse audiences and defended our project. Besides, the experience also broadened our understanding of the healthcare landscape.

The competition had ignited our passion and we’re eager to bring even more innovations to the world of medicine.

Lastly, we would also like to take this opportunity and extend our heartfelt thanks to our tech mentor, Prof Elaine Chan Wan Ling, whose invaluable guidance and support were fundamental in our success. We’re also deeply grateful to our dedicated advisors, including A/Prof Kavitha, Prof Gerry George, Dr Wan Siti Halimatul Munirah, Dr Arun Kumar Basavaraj, Dr Shilpa Murthy, Dr Saint Nway Aye, A/Prof Dr Justin Vijay Gnanou, for their unwavering support throughout this journey.

We hope our experience will inspire other young medical students to venture out from their comfort zone and contribute to the future of healthcare. Let’s keep driving the future of healthcare together, where every challenge becomes a stepping stone towards saving more lives and improving patient outcomes.