Austria 1

Thomas Aumeyr (19)

City/Region: Neumarkt/H, Upper Austria E-mail: thomas_aumeyr@yahoo.com Hobbies: Reading, fitness, snowboarding, skiing and swimming. Career: Research scientist School: MTBLA Braunau

Thomas Morocutti (19)

City/Region: Aurolzmüster, Upper Austria E-mail: mc_moro@yahoo.de Hobbies: Soccer, volleyball, table tennis, cutting and editing films Career: Computer scientist School: MTBLA Braunau

CURE - Controlled Ultraviolet Radiation Equipment

The two boys wanted to develop a treatment for skin diseases to try and improve some of the today's leading skin radiation techniques. Whereby undiseased parts of the skin would not be harmed and only diseased skin parts would be irradiated. In the conventional way of treating skin diseases, in for example the case of psoriasis; healthy parts of the skin are unnecessarily exposed to ultraviolet light radiation. Thus healthy parts of the skin are exposed to a high risk of skin cancer because the radiation devices cannot distinguish between the healthy and diseased areas of the skin. So the two boys developed a treatment to mark off the healthy skin parts so that the diseased skin is radiated only. The skin that is to be treated is photographed using a digital camera. The picture is then sent to a computer where it is stored and displayed. When the physician has marked the areas of the skin which have to be radiated, a special image processing software marks the area of the skin that needs to be irradiated and then turns it into a format that can be processed by the hardware. The device consisting primarily of many small controllable mirrors is arranged in a matrix and is aligned via a serial port. In this way all the mirrors that are required to radiate the selected skin parts are switched on and it is only these mirrors that deflect the ultraviolet light to the diseased skin.

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