Edward Kang’s RetinaMind analyzes patients’ retinal images and accurately diagnoses neurodevelopmental disorders 89 percent of the time Kang’s invention won second place and an award of $175,000 at the 2026  Regeneron Science Talent Search , the oldest and most prestigious science, technology, engineering and math competition for high school students in the United States. Society for Science Three years ago, Edward Kang was sifting through research papers for ideas for a school project when he came across an intriguing study by researchers at the Chinese University of Hong Kong that used retinal images to diagnose autism. “I thought it was fascinating and really unintuitive that you can use something like the eye to understand what’s happening in the brain,” says Kang, now a 17-year-old high school senior at Bergen County Academies in Hackensack, New Jersey. The teenager set out to make the researchers’ model even more accurate. Ultimately, these efforts led him to develop RetinaMind—an A.I.…