Nahid Bakhtari
Ariel Yang and Nahid Bakhtari are medical students at Stony Brook School of Medicine in New York. Together, they are conducting research on soil-transmitted helminth infections in rural villages in the Ifanadiana district in Madagascar. Nahid Bakhtari completed her bachelor’s at Baruch Macaulay Honors College in New York in psychology and biology. Before starting medical school she was a chemistry adjunct professor at Baruch College. She conducted research on metal chelation, studying ether chelators’ metal binding abilities. She also worked in a psychosocial learning lab, analyzing how social context, affect and cognition impact learning and problem solving-behavior. At Stony Brook, she is involved with the Global Health Institute, working on the Soil-Transmitted Parasites Treatment Project in Madagascar this summer. In Madagascar, she will work to assess the knowledge, practices and perceptions of helminthiasis, as well as testing a point-of-care diagnosis method using a smartphone application with image classification software and inexpensive microscopy. Nahid's goal as a future physician is to work in public health in order to bring about a stronger and wider available form of preventative medicine to populations in need. She aims to follow a career path as an Emergency Medicine physician with a Master’s in public health in order to further her research projects in improving health and working with global communities.
Project: "Evaluating the efficacy of an artificial neural network smartphone application for point-of-care diagnosis"
6/04/2018 - 6/26/2018
Madagascar
What does the Kean Fellowship mean to you?
Madagascar is characterized by the WHO as the fourth-least-developed nation in the world by sanitation indicators. Rural areas, such as the Ifanadiana district are heavily afflicted by poverty, malnutrition and a variety of neglected tropical diseases that lead to physical underdevelopment in children. The Kean Fellowship has given us the opportunity to travel and compose research in this area in order to better treat helminth infections, thus alleviating the burdens this disease has on the community. With the help of this grant, we were able to bring resources and awareness to an area and people who are in definite need.
What do you anticipate learning?
Knowledge toward helminthiasis in rural Madagascar is unstudied, making it difficult to plan health initiatives that fit in the context of local life or understand the ineffectiveness of previous projects. We hope to assess local beliefs concerning helminthiasis causes, prevention and treatment to design effective and culturally relevant education and healthcare projects. Laboratory diagnosis of soil-transmitted helminthiasis is largely inaccessible to rural Madagascar. We will test a point-of-care diagnosis method: a smartphone application using image classification software and inexpensive microscopy to demonstrate that technology can harness local resources in countries for little to no additional cost and improve standard of care.
After this project, if it proves successful, we plan to release the specifications, databases and protocols used in understanding/developing the deep learning neural network software online for free. There are thousands of potential applications of deep learning neural network software in the field of healthcare, but the ones who best understand the problems at hand often do not have expertise in the technology behind a solution. We hope by proving such solutions work in the instance of helminthiases, we can open the way for researchers to follow a radically accessible new standard for healthcare intervention.
What interests you about tropical medicine and what problems are you interested in solving?
Tropical diseases affect millions of people, gravely decrease quality of life and lead to fatalities. Many are known to be easily preventable, yet they remain widely neglected around the world. We want to work in tropical medicine because we are dissatisfied with the global status quo of stark healthcare disparities. Technology and concomitant education has an uncanny way of leaping over traditional barriers to access like income and distance. We want our careers to help bridge the access gap to healthcare for critical populations, in the US and in lower- and middle-income countries. In our medical school research, residency and beyond, we want to create freely accessible, easily adapted resources that address medical needs and educate and empower local populations, the ones best positioned to understand the resource constraints of their healthcare infrastructure, to develop custom healthcare solutions that work best for them.