The Genesis:
A few days before his 8th birthday Arya was diagnosed with Leukemia
in July 2006
Arya was always a very hardy child. So, when in early
July after an 4th of July trip to Houston,
when he suddenly fell sick it alarmed his parents. His dad made it a point to
take Arya to the Pediatrician for a checkup. The verdict was flu or some
bacterial infection. In abundance of caution, he was given antibiotics. Unfortunately,
he was not responding to his medication. This led to a daily visit to the
Pediatrician’s office. The diagnosis kept changing and on that Saturday, the
Doctor settled on Mon virus as Arya had inflamed liver. At his dad’s urge the Doctor ordered a CT
scan of Arya’s liver for better diagnosis. But, with his medical research
background, his dad was highly apprehensive and literally forced the Doctor to
order a blood test. The Doctor agreed reluctantly. Dad took Arya to the ER
center of the Valley Hospital in Ridgewood, NJ. After the CT scan and blood
test (CBC), the DR. called his parents aside, and gave the heart breaking news
that Arya has Leukemia, He also told that based on his internship experience in
Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center (MSKCC), he could convincingly diagnose
it to be ALL pre B type. This news was devastating, not just because it was
cancer, buUnforyt the fact that Arya’s Pediatrician
was grossly negligent in not ordering the blood test much earlier. In ER Arya’s
condition started deteriorating very rapidly. With his prior knowledge of
Cancer treatment Arya’s dad knew that it was best to treat Arya in MSKCC. The
Dr. agreed as well. Unfortunately, due to medical insurance procedural
wrangles, Arya could not be admitted to MSKCC until coming Monday. By that
time, Arya was very sick with high fever
and in severe pain. Once admitted to MSKCC the Oncology team could not start
Arya’s treatment immediately as he needed urgent blood transfusions to
stabilize his vitals.
Arya responded to his treatment regimen very well and
after several rounds of strong chemo, he went into remission. Unfortunately,
after about two years he relapsed and needed chemo treatment once again. The
Doctors recommended Bone Marrow Transfusion (BMT). After a long search a
not-so-perfect match was found and in April 2009, Arya went through Bone Marrow
Transplant. Initially he responded well and it appeared that he would beat back
Cancer. But luck was not on our side. Arya relapsed back to cancer in Dec 2009.
His Oncologists recommended a second round of BMT. For a BMT, it is essential
that the patient is in full remission. To our dismay, full remission could not
be achieved and after a longvaliant fight with
Cancer, Arya passed away on April 25, 2010.
Creation of Cancer Scanner Early Warning system
for Blood Cancer:
As Arya’s father, I have been haunted by the fact that
I failed to help Arya in early diagnosis of Leukemia. May be I could have saved
his life.
It is well-established through medical research at
several major cancer centers that Early diagnosis of leukemia significantly
improves treatment success rates, reduces the risk of life-threatening
complications, and allows for less aggressive therapy options. Detecting
cancer before it advances or spreads to multiple organs effectively prevents
critical organ damage and helps patients achieve faster remission. Catching
leukemia early—especially acute types—prevents rapid cancer cell replication,
vastly improving long-term prognosis. It also results in Fewer Complications,
affords gentler treatment options, helps prevent damage to major organs caused
by strong chemo. Patients diagnosed early often have stronger immune systems, making
them ideal candidates for cutting-edge medical trials and novel therapies.
According to the American Oncology Institute “When it comes to fighting any
form of cancer, time is of the essence. This is especially true for blood
cancer, a collective term for malignancies like leukemia, lymphoma, and myeloma
that affect blood, bone marrow, or lymphatic systems. Early diagnosis is often
the most critical factor influencing a patient's treatment options, quality of
life, and survival rate.”.
(https://www.americanoncology.com/blogs/why-early-diagnosis-matters-in-blood-cancer-treatment).
Unfortunately, I did not have the same level of
knowledge of cancer diagnosis when Arya was still alive. So, I have made it my
mission to help other families, both children and adults. In 2022 Cheng Yu et
al has reported that “Leukemia can be Effectively Predicted Early in Routine
Physical Examination with the Assistance of Machine Learning Models” (J Healthcare Eng.. 2022 Nov
24;2022:8641194.). As a Data Scientist I know that Machine learning models are
not available in a Pediatrician’s office in USA, and very likely not anywhere
else in the world.
Luckily, the recent advents of AI has opened doors for
AI assisted early warning systems for cancer and several other diseases. With
that background I have developed an AI assisted Early warning system for
Leukemia, Lymphoma and other major blood disorders and cancers. This system was
developed using my firsthand knowledge of what we had to go through for Arya’s
cancer diagnosis. The Cancer-scanner tool takes into account
a plethora of health conditions and symptoms and then runs an advanced
percentage risk analysis calculation developed by AI to predict the probability
of Cancer in a patient. We are fully aware that “NO AI” can substitute a
human doctor for definitive disease diagnosis and especially for Blood Cancers
that requires bone marrow analysis. We have designed our tool to provide a
Cancer Risk analysis for possible early diagnosis of Blood Cancer and other
major blood disorders. We do not think it is appropriate to postulate that our
AI tool can actually provide definitive early diagnosis of Blood Cancer.
Since blood cancers are not limited to USA, we have
made our Cancer Scanner AI tool capable of providing service in multiple
foreign languages. July 29, 2026, is Arya’s 28th Birthday. In honor
of this special day, we have made our tool available in 28 different languages
spanning all major continents of the world.
Cancer Scanner AI Tool Validation:
As a medical researcher and a data Science Engineer, I
strongly believe that any tool for early detection or early warning of cancer
must be validated by an independent group of professionals. Accordingly, we
have run our tool by several Doctors in USA and India. We have also consulted
several engineers and scientists to evaluate our tool. The overall determination
is that this tool is very helpful in achieving early warning of Blood Cancers.
To be sure that our tool does provide accurate results, we are currently
working with several major Cancer hospitals and research centers for further
validation of our Cancer Scanner AI tool.
We take patient confidentiality very seriously. One of
the major risks of using AI in disease diagnosis is the exposure of private and
confidential data of the patients and other users. To completely eliminate any data
privacy issues and to make our tool compliant with all major data privacy laws
like HIPAA (US), GDPR (EU), DPDP (India) & so on, no patient name or
any other identifier is needed to use our Cancer Scanner tool. No data is ever
collected or saved by our tool. Nor do we use any input patient data to train
our AI models. We have made our tool very light weight such that it can run on
any internet connected device capable of running a major internet browser.
It is our sincere hope that this tool will be able to
save lives and help patients make use of better and milder treatment options.
This tool is being published and promoted by Arya’s Kids Foundation as one of
the missions of our foundation is to improve the quality of lives of cancer
patients and provide better outcome of cancer treatment. Early diagnosis
definitely helps achieve these goals. The Cancer Scanner tool is completely
free of cost to use and can be used anonymously from anywhere in the world.
FEEDBACK:
We highly appreciate receiving feedback or suggestions
for improvement from the users. Pl. email to risk-scanner@aryaskids.org.