Microsoft on Tuesday revealed the winners of this year's Imagine Cup in SA.
The overall winner, Joshua Leibstein, from the University of Johannesburg, will represent SA in the international Imagine Cup, which takes place in Australia next year.
Leibstein, a mechanical engineering student, designed a computer-aided detection programme that detects tuberculoses at an early stage. The programme is an image processing application, which helps radiologists detect signs of TB.
“I was inspired to create a solution to a serious medical problem in SA, where TB has the seventh highest incidence in the world, and is unfortunately endemic in mineworkers,” said Leibstein. “The early detection system has the potential to increase the success level of TB-related treatments available to rural and underdeveloped areas.”
This year, the competition saw 40 finalists from across the country compete for prizes. The finalists represented their universities in teams, and in some cases, individually. Leibstein won the overall prize competing as an individual. Cash and prizes were awarded to third, second and first place in three categories, namely gaming design, software design and Windows Phone challenge.
Opportunity for students
How it works:
Reading radiographs can be a repetitive task for the radiographer.
To address this problem, a CAD (Computer-Aided Detection) was developed using GPGPU (General Purpose Graphics Processing Unit) image processing techniques.
This system is a test bench for image analysis that assists a radiologist in the diagnosis of the tuberculosis structures in a chest radiograph, by using Local Binary Pattern texture classification methods.
The parallelisation potential of a GPU is exploited to accelerate the image processing techniques utilised in the system, increasing patient throughput.
Microsoft says the Imagine Cup, now in its 10th year, provides an opportunity for students to use their creativity, passion, and knowledge of technology to help solve global challenges and make a difference in the world.
Speaking at the awards ceremony, Microsoft head of developer and platform team Clifford de Wit said the judges were “hugely impressed” by the students' projects. De Wit also argued that South African developers had a unique advantage because of the growth potential SA holds. He added that, according to a survey run by ITWeb and Microsoft, there are more jobs advertised for software developers than for any other ICT professionals.
Isaac Maredi, director of ICT at the Department of Science and Technology, said computer science is central to driving innovation and development of communities locally and on a global scale.
“These students' creativity fills me with hope and excitement, because it speaks volumes about the promise of technology to advance the way we think, work and communicate in SA, and beyond,” he said.
Share
