A sibling team from Cupertino is moving on to the final round of the prestigious Siemens Competition in Washington, D.C., and a chance to win $100,000.

Anika Cheerla, 14, and Nikhil Cheerla, 17, were named national finalists in the science, math and technology competition on Nov. 14. The news came after the Monta Vista High School duo made a presentation to a panel of judges in the regional finals this month. Their project, “Mitosis Detection and Tumor Grading Using Deep Convolutional Neural Networks,” deals with identifying cell division activity in relation to dangerous tumors.

The two received a $6,000 scholarship for their project and a trip to Washington, D.C., for the finals on Dec. 5-6 at George Washington University. There they will compete against other science stars for more than $500,000 in prizes. Two first-place scholarships of $100,000 will be awarded.

Started in 1999, the Siemens Competition is a prestigious research contest focused on math, science and technology. This year, of approximately 1,600 applicants nationwide, 498 semifinalists and 96 regional finalists were chosen. Of the 96, only 10 projects–five individual and five team–are chosen as national finalists.

Judges were wowed by the brother-and-sister team’s project.

“Doctors tend to look at mitotic activity in magnified biopsy slides to determine how aggressive a tumor is and how quickly it will spread,” Nikhil said about the project. “We developed an automated system that could analyze these biopsy slides, count mitotic cells, and return a score indicative of the amount of malignant mitotic activity in a slide. Because our system is more accurate, consistent and informative than the grades that pathologists assign, doctors can use it to get more diagnostic information about tumors.”

Dr. Alexandre Cunha, director of the Center for Advanced Methods in Biological Image Analysis at Caltech and Siemens Competition judge, said in a press statement that Anika and Nikhil’s project shows real promise for advancing future technology.

“Nikhil and Anika’s research shows not only creativity but also initiative to solve real-world problems,” he said. “Using artificial intelligence to address the important problem of automatic cancer detection through computing is of great societal value. This innovation could potentially save pathologists hours of tedious manual image analysis, improve performance, and quantify cancer severity in a patient more reliably. Nikhil and Anika have shown maturity to take on such an important project at the graduate school level.”

Nikhil said being named as national finalists reaffirms his and his sister’s work.

“It’s really always great to know that other people appreciate all the time you spent investigating and researching,” he said. “Our selection also makes me optimistic that our research could be quickly integrated into clinical practice.”

Anika hopes their research can make a difference.

“We hope our mitosis detection and tumor grading tool can be easily implemented in a clinical setting to help doctors, and therefore help patients.”

In addition to their research for the Siemens Competition, Nikhil and Anika also help teach young students programming and mathematics skills through the volunteer organization MathAndCoding, started by Nikhil in 2014.

For more information, visit siemenscompetition.discoveryeducation.com.