Yeming Shen, 28, was found dead on February 10. His autopsy revealed a positive test for influenza A

A graduate student has been found dead in his home of the flu after a garbled 911 call left rescuers with no means of locating him, authorities said.

Yeming Shen, 28, was found by his roommate dead in their dorm room at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in Troy, New York on February 10, six hours after Shen called 911 for help.

Dispatchers were unable to understand the garbled call, and were only able to trace the location of his cell phone to the student housing complex he lived in on Sixth Avenue.

Five officers, three firefighters and a police dog searched the common areas on each floor but only had his cellphone number to go on and could not locate his apartment, authorities said.

After 45 minutes of searching the apartment complex, the rescuers gave up.

An autopsy determined the student had influenza A, officials said.

Emergency dispatch systems still struggle to deliver the precise location of cellphone users a quarter-century after the devices became commonplace.

The system was only able to provide a general location on Sixth Avenue, which included two five-story apartment buildings.

Shen had been in the graduate program at RPI's Industrial and Systems Engineering School for three years, and had worked on a number of cross-disciplinary projects, according to memorial notice from his advisor Thomas Sharkey.

Police and firefighters searched this apartment complex but could not find Shen

Shen was a co-author on the paper titled 'Integrative analytics for detecting and disrupting transnational interdependent criminal smuggling, money, and money-laundering networks', which received the best paper award in the track on Land/Maritime Borders and Critical Infrastructure at the 2018 IEEE HST Conference.

He was also lead author on the paper 'Interdicting interdependent contraband smuggling, money and money laundering networks with inaccurate information.'

'He was closing in on finishing a third paper but his meticulous and independent nature had him continually refining his methods to improve their performance –which is exactly what you would want from a PhD student,' Sharkey wrote.