A group of Green Level High School students are in the running to win a national science competition with an app they created to find bone cancer.

Hasini Kanthi, Isaac Yuan, Hila Belinson, Sathvik Talluri and Jacob Iwaniw are the creators of RadiAid. They said the app uses AI to look at radiograph scans to find osteosarcoma.

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It all started about a year ago when Kanthi started researching ideas for how to help with the treatment of osteosarcoma. 

"I really needed guidance obviously because I didn't know what I was doing and I literally hopped in my car, I drove to Duke and I started knocking on doctors' doors. Dr. Eward was the one that answered the door and he's been obviously an integral part of our project," Kanthi said.

From there, Kanthi started assembling the team from her classmates who were also interested in engineering and biotechnology.

"There was a recruiting process and we were handpicked by Hasini herself," Talluri said. The junior is the youngest member of the RadiAid team.

The National Cancer Institute says that this kind of cancer is most common in kids and young adults. While scans that can detect osteosarcoma quickly are accessible in the United States, it can be harder--and more expensive--to get them in more rural countries which often leads to later diagnoses. The team hopes RadiAid can change that.

Their work on the tool has won multiple science competitions, including most recently an award from the Toshiba ExploraVision National Science Competition. The competition, which is run by the National Science Teaching Association, selects 24 K-12 regional winners.

The RadiAid team was one of six winners in the 10-12 grade category. Now, they're in the running to win the national award. However, these students say they have bigger goals than that.

"After probably four or five years we want to essentially get FDA approved and start putting this out into the market and help allowing these low resource clinics to use our technology," Yuan said.

"We're young but we're serious about this and we're building this to change lives and change like the biotechnology field," Iwaniw said.

The award ceremony for the regional award is set for March 24. The national award winners will be announced on April 28.