bioXcel

bioXcel input and output

Problem

As a Biologist, I (Daniella) work in Tyrone Hayes's lab that discovered how the pesticide Atrazine causes sex reversal in frogs. As part of my research, I go to the field where we take hand-written notes and I go back home to transcribe my notes to a spreadsheet. This process is long and frustrating and it's something that costs a lot of time for biologists.

Solution

You take a picture with your phone of the hand-written data and our script transcribes it into table format and gives you a summary in seconds

Challenges we ran into

We initially attempted to build an OCR system from scratch, however, the process was slow and we realized that there were API solutions out there. After speaking with a mentor, our approach changed to focusing on our problem-specific domain knowledge and we integrated existing APIs to make our product a reality.

What's next for bioXcel

The future of this project is really exciting. First, we will create front-end development to enable nontechnical users to use our product. Next, we will add a feature that enables users to determine the data type and optionally possible values of each column. This will significantly improve transcription accuracy. And finally, in the long term, we would like to build more in-house software to minimize API dependencies.

Why us

We understand the problem better than anyone. Daniella has domain knowledge in field research and can understand's our users as she is one! Rene has the technical skills and product experience to build this.