Ohio Teen Takes On Rural Medicine’s Hardest Problem—and Presents His Solution at Dartmouth College
While most high school juniors spent this week in class, Aviraj Soin was standing in front of some of the country’s leading rural health researchers, presenting an AI-powered diagnostic tool he built himself. Soin, a high school junior, from Yellow Springs, Ohio — a community of roughly 3,700 people — traveled to Hanover, New Hampshire this week to present original artificial intelligence machine-learning research at the Dartmouth Rural Health Symposium, one of the nation’s premier gatherings of rural health clinicians, researchers, and policymakers.
His message was direct: rural patients with spinal pain are getting shortchanged, and data science can help fix it.
The Problem
More than half of the 1.9 million patients served by Dartmouth Health live in rural areas. They travel farther for specialty care. They wait longer for answers. And when advanced diagnostic tools and specialists aren’t nearby, the margin for diagnostic error grows. For patients suffering from complex spinal conditions — conditions that can be debilitating and difficult to distinguish from one another — that gap in access can mean months of wrong treatments before the right diagnosis is reached.
Soin saw that problem and decided to build a solution.
The Research
His poster — Leveling the Playing Field in Rural Health Care by Implementing an Artificial Intelligent Machine Learning Algorithm to Accurately Diagnose Spinal Pain Conditions: A 250-Patient Study — presents a machine-learning model trained on data from 250 patients across four distinct spinal diagnoses: lumbar radiculopathy, lumbar spondylosis without myelopathy, post-laminectomy syndrome, and sacroiliitis.
The model draws on approximately 80 clinical variables: pain scores, functional status, symptom location, pain duration, patient-reported pain diaries, and prior interventions including physical therapy, injections, and surgery. The goal is to give rural physicians a data-driven decision-support tool — one that brings the diagnostic rigor of a major academic medical center to a clinic that may have no specialist on staff.
The model is designed to support physician judgment, not replace it. Soin is clear about that distinction, and about where the research stands: the next steps are identifying the most predictive variables, trimming unnecessary inputs, expanding the patient dataset, and continuing to optimize the algorithm. Clinical validation is the objective. He is building toward it methodically.
The Stage
The Dartmouth Rural Health Symposium, held May 12–13, 2026, at the Hanover Inn, drew researchers, clinicians, and community leaders under the theme “Transforming Rural Health Care: Research-Driven Solutions, Real-World Impact.” The 2025 inaugural symposium drew more than 270 participants. This year’s program featured poster presentations, research sessions, and policy discussions — and Soin’s research poster earned a place among them.
He is believed to be among the youngest presenters in the symposium’s history.
The Inventor
This is not Soin’s first time at this level. Ohio Academy of Science records show him as the only high junior to qualify for State Science Day for 7 consecutive years. He and his brother Dhilen are named inventors of multiple patents like a GPS system to track a moving object. Together they co-founded Soin Pharmaceuticals, a startup developing oral thin-film drug-delivery technology.
He is a junior in high school.
From a small town in Ohio, Aviraj Soin is asking a question that the rural health field has struggled to answer for decades: what if distance from a specialist didn’t have to mean distance from an accurate diagnosis? He doesn’t have the final answer yet. But he is doing the serious, careful work of finding it — and the Dartmouth Rural Health Symposium took notice.
