After 18 years of trying – and 15 rounds of in vitro fertilization – an American couple successfully conceived thanks to artificial intelligence.
AI previously has been used to assess which embryos are the healthiest to transfer during IVF and to test the quality of a woman’s eggs before freezing them, according to CNN. But this is the first time an AI program developed to detect viable sperm in the semen of men with rare type of infertility has been used to help a married couple get pregnant.
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The father has azoospermia, a type of infertility that occurs when the semen contains low or no sperm. It occurs in about 1% of infertile men. Though infertility is often thought of as a woman’s problem, as many as 50% of cases in which couples can’t conceive is due, at least in part, to male infertility.
The couple, who wanted to be anonymous to maintain their privacy, had considered surgery and other options, but then learned about the STAR method at Columbia University Fertility Center. STAR, which stands for Sperm Track and Recovery, uses AI to scan semen for living sperm. For this couple, STAR was able to detect three sperm in the man’s semen sample that were then used to fertilize an egg from his wife. The embryo was transferred to her uterus via IVF, according to multiple media outlets.
“It took me two days to believe I was actually pregnant,” the mother, who conceived in March, told CNN.
It took Dr. Zev Williams, director of Columbia’s fertility clinic, five years to develop STAR, which uses an AI algorithm and a fluidic chip to scan semen for sperm and isolate them for use in IVF or to be frozen, according to TIME.
“To test the system, before we discarded samples where embryologists could not find any sperm, we decided to run those samples through the system,” Williams told TIME. “The embryologists really worked hard to find sperm, since they didn’t want to be outshone by a machine. In one of the samples they analyzed for two days and found no sperm, STAR found 44 in an hour.”
The Columbia University Fertility Center is the only place STAR is currently available. But Williams and his colleagues hope to publish their research and make it available to other fertility clinics, according to CNN.
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