MediCheck: A Design Thinking Approach to Early-Stage Childhood Cancer Detection and Geolocation-Enabled Diagnostic Support in India
Abstract
Catching childhood cancer early is the single most critical factor in determining survival. In India, where roughly 75,000 children are diagnosed every year, survival rates remain low, mostly because of delays in finding care, rural-urban disparities, and a lack of baseline awareness. In this study, they share the design and implementation of MediCheck, a web-based clinical screening and hospital mapping application built to guide parents from initial symptom concern to professional oncology consultations. Following a five-stage Design Thinking process (Empathize, Define, Ideate, Prototype, and Test), they structured the tool around a weighted symptom overlap index, real-time explainability features, and side-by-side benign differential diagnosis cards to ease parent anxiety. Geolocation-aware mapping connects users directly with oncology units via the Google Places API. To check the system's underlying logic, they ran two validation pipelines: a clinical risk classifier trained on synthetic symptom records (achieving 98.9% accuracy with an RF-Gradient Boosting ensemble) and a cell smear classifier trained on augmented blood images (reaching 95% accuracy in flagging lymphoblastic leukemia). User feedback showed that the platform helps parents organize symptom timelines, making consultations with doctors more effective.
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