From 2015 through 2016, a serious epidemic of Zika virus spread through parts of South America and North America. According to the World Health Organization, by 2017, this virus affected 90 major cities in 35 countries. By 2019, cases of Zika virus were found in California, Florida, and other US states.
The Zika virus spreads when a person is bitten by an infected mosquito. Symptoms are typically mild and last less than a week. Zika virus poses a serious threat, however, to pregnant women. An infection during pregnancy can cause infants to be born with congenital deformities and neurological complications. Research indicates that these Zika-related deformities and complications are caused by low gestational oxygen during fetal development.
Dr. Martin Frasch from the OB/GYN department of the University of Washington’s School of Medicine collaborated with researchers from the University of Cambridge on a study of whether fetuses’ hearts would “remember” their gestational low oxygen after birth. By studying the cohorts of children in Brazil who suffered low gestational oxygen due to their mothers’ exposure to the Zika virus, Dr. Frasch’s team found that there is indeed “memory for this type of low oxygen exposure” years after birth.
Targeted Search
Using ResoluteAI, you can find Dr. Martin Frasch’s research as well as other research in the area of Zika’s impact on fetal cardiac problems. Currently, there are only four publications with this research. ResoluteAI’s advanced search tool allows users to narrow down these publications by specifying keyword criteria in their query. Using artificial intelligence and machine learning, ResoluteAI finds concepts related to the queries in both the titles as well as in the bodies of the publications’ articles.
Easy and Transparent Navigation
Users who want to narrow their search criteria further without knowing more about the subject matter can navigate through research concepts easily by using the “tags” and “categories” features of ResoluteAI. Tags are usually research terms that are most frequently referred to in the search results, while categories are the subject areas under which a given publication falls.
Conducting research on the Zika virus, or any other epidemic, is a time-consuming and complicated task. With clinicians and researchers in many countries conducting different types of research related to the disease, cutting down the time it takes to find summaries of previous research, as well as curating the research in a centralized hub, helps to streamline the process of research and innovation. When less time is spent on finding research, more time can be spent on conducting research, and testing applications of that research. As the research-to-market time horizon is critical for the treatment of epidemics, tools like ResoluteAI empower the scientists making critical research contributions.
