Jana Zhou
Tick-Tac-Toe: A Machine Learning Solution for Tick Identification
London Central Secondary School
There are 40 species of ticks in Canada, but only Blacklegged ticks can transmit Lyme disease (1). Lyme disease is a bacterial infection that can lead to many chronic conditions if not treated properly (2). Diagnosing it can be challenging because it is difficult to differentiate Blacklegged ticks from other ticks. The current method of tick identification in Canada is manually conducted, and takes days to produce results (3). This is a problem because when it comes to Lyme disease, time is of the essence! I developed a deep convolutional neural network and trained it on over 10000 unique tick images. The network can accurately identify images of Blacklegged ticks from other ticks in real time, and could be used by the medical and veterinary industry, as well as the general public, to streamline the complicated Lyme disease diagnosis process.
Silver Medal
Dalhousie University, Faculty of Science – $2500 Entrance Scholarship
University of Ottawa – $2000 Entrance Scholarship
Western University – $2000 Entrance Scholarship