AI Makes It Possible For Couple to Conceive After 18 Years

After trying to conceive for 18 years, one couple is now pregnant with their first child thanks to the power of artificial intelligence.

The couple had undergone several rounds of in vitro fertilization, or IVF, visiting fertility centers around the world in the hopes of having a baby.

The IVF process involves removing a woman’s egg and combining it with sperm in a laboratory to create an embryo, which is then implanted in the womb.

But for this couple, the IVF attempts were unsuccessful due to azoospermia, a rare condition in which no measurable sperm are present in the male partner’s semen, which can lead to male infertility.

A typical semen sample contains hundreds of millions of sperm, but men with azoospermia have such low counts that no sperm cells can be found, even after hours of meticulous searching under a microscope.

So the couple, who wish to remain anonymous to protect their privacy, went to the Columbia University Fertility Center to try a novel approach.

It’s called the STAR method, and it uses AI to help identify and recover hidden sperm in men who once thought they had no sperm at all. All the husband had to do was leave a semen sample with the medical team.

“We kept our hopes to a minimum after so many disappointments,” the wife said in an emailed statement.

Researchers at the fertility center analyzed the semen sample with the AI system. Three hidden sperm were found, recovered and used to fertilize the wife’s eggs via IVF, and she became the first successful pregnancy enabled by the STAR method.

The baby is due in December.

“It took me two days to believe I was actually pregnant,” she said. “I still wake up in the morning and can’t believe if this is true or not. I still don’t believe I am pregnant until I see the scans.”

Dr. Zev Williams, director of the Columbia University Fertility Center, and his colleagues spent five years developing the STAR method to help detect and recover sperm in semen samples from people who had azoospermia.

They were struck by the system’s results.

“A patient provided a sample, and highly skilled technicians looked for two days through that sample to try to find sperm. They didn’t find any. We brought it to the AI-based STAR System. In one hour, it found 44 sperm. So right then, we realized, ‘Wow, this is really a game-changer. This is going to make such a big difference for patients,’” said Williams, who led the research team.

When a semen sample is placed on a specially designed chip under a microscope, the STAR system – which stands for Sperm Tracking and Recovery – connects to the microscope through a high-speed camera and high-powered imaging technology to scan the sample, taking more than 8 million images in under an hour to find what it has been trained to identify as a sperm cell.

The system instantly isolates that sperm cell into a tiny droplet of media, allowing embryologists to recover cells that they may never have been able to find or identify with their own eyes.

“It’s like searching for a needle scattered across a thousand haystacks, completing the search in under an hour and doing it so gently, without any harmful lasers or stains, that the sperm can still be used to fertilize an egg,” Williams said.

“What’s remarkable is that instead of the usual [200 million] to 300 million sperm in a typical sample, these patients may have just two or three. Not 2 [million] or 3 million, literally two or three,” he said. “But with the precision of the STAR system and the expertise of our embryologists, even those few can be used to successfully fertilize an egg.”

Source: CNN