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How Global Health Impacts Health Care in North Carolina

February 7, 2025
Global health issues may seem geographically distant, but they directly impact our local community through travel, immigration, emerging infectious diseases, and interconnected global economies. The ‘global’ in global health refers to the scope of problems, not just their location, which can be infectious diseases with pandemic potention. UNC’s global and...

AI-Enabled Ultrasound Revolutionizes Gestational Age Estimation in Low-Resource Settings

August 2, 2024
A groundbreaking study published in the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) demonstrates that artificial intelligence (AI) can enable novice users to estimate gestational age as accurately as expert sonographers, potentially transforming pregnancy care in low-resource settings. Researchers from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill’s Institute for...

UNC Research Validates AI-Powered Gestational Age Calculator Used on Butterfly iQ+ for Global Pregnancy Care

October 9, 2023
An innovative AI tool developed at the University of North Carolina (UNC) and deployed on the Butterfly IQ+ handheld ultrasound probe can measure gestational age as accurately as a trained expert using an expensive, full-sized ultrasound machine. Chapel Hill, NC (October 9, 2023) — A groundbreaking study presented today by University...

Bringing Global to North Carolina

August 29, 2022
In a hospital, ambulance or a remote village in sub-Saharan Africa, researchers are focused on improving pregnancy outcomes with access to high-quality obstetric ultrasound, when and where it’s needed. Each year some 300,000 women and 3 million babies worldwide die during childbirth or shortly thereafter, according to the World Health Organization,...

UNC Receives $17 Million to Develop AI-Enabled Obstetric Ultrasound

August 22, 2022
UNC-Chapel Hill has received a $17 million grant from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation to continue groundbreaking work in artificial intelligence (AI)-enabled obstetric ultrasound. CHAPEL HILL, NC – The new award will support an interdisciplinary team from the UNC School of Medicine and Gillings School of Global Public Health,...

UNC Landmark Study Paves the Way for Universal Obstetric Ultrasound

April 7, 2022
Establishing accurate gestational age with ultrasound early in pregnancy is essential to delivering high-quality care.Yet, the high cost for equipment and the need for trained sonographers limits its use in low-resource settings. A new study published in NEJM Evidence introduces a novel opportunity to democratize obstetric ultrasound. UNC investigators from...

Gates Foundation awards UNC Global Women’s Health $6.2 million to study pregnancy outcomes in Zambia

December 9, 2020
UNC Global Women’s Health has received two new grants from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation for work on pregnancy outcomes in Zambia. The first grant funds the “Multi-omics for Mother and Infants (MOMI) Consortium,” which seeks to identify new predictive biomarkers for preterm birth, preeclampsia, stillbirth and fetal growth...

Institute research sampling, 2018-2020

July 7, 2020
By the spring of 2020, the urgency of the COVID-19 pandemic caused many researchers affiliated with UNC’s Institute for Global Health and Infectious Diseases to pivot their studies to focus on testing, treatment and prevention of the SARS-CoV-2 virus. Here, a look at some of the projects underway in the...

Team lands $14M to improve pregnancy outcomes

May 15, 2019
A team led by Jeff Stringer, MD, associate director of research for the Institute for Global Health & Infectious Diseases, has received $14 million from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation to conduct two studies aimed at improving pregnancy outcomes in the world’s poorest countries. The interdisciplinary group from departments...