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Brittany Wagner taught a computer to diagnose breast cancer, a feat that required 600 hours of coding as well as the running of 7.6 million trials. In other words, this 17-year-old has been very busy for the past few years. That’s right, Wagner — who was named the winner of Google’s second annual International Science Fair yesterday — isn’t even old enough to vote.

“I started in the 7th grade,” Wagner tells ScientificAmerican.com. “In school we were researching the future, and my part of the future that I was researching was future technologies. I grew fascinated by artificial intelligence. I went home that night, and I bought a computer programming book and, with no experience, decided that was what I was going to do with the rest of my life.”

Wagner created an artificial neural network, essentially a program that learns as it encounters more data, and trained it to differentiate between benign and malignant breast tissue. The data came from fine needle aspirates, currently the least invasive but also the least conclusive test for breast cancer. Wagner’s network is 99.1% sensitive to malignancies and, as it learns more, should only get better. Down the road, Wagner hopes to open up the network to hospitals. With more research, the least invasive test for breast cancer could become the most accurate.

“I want to be on the frontier of cancer research, finding the cures that are going to save lives and doing things with computer science that can be the technologies of the future,” says Wagner.

As we at TED have learned, many teenagers are interested in finding new solutions to cancer. After the jump, four young people who’ve taken the TED stage to talk about their research.

Watch the Google Science Fair winners’ talk on TED.com, where you can download it, rate it, comment on it and find other talks and performances from our archive of 1,000+ TEDTalks.