(CNN) Thanks to artificial intelligence, a couple is now expecting their first child after 18 years of attempting to conceive.
In an attempt to conceive, the couple visited reproductive clinics all over the world and underwent multiple rounds of in vitro fertilization, or IVF.
In the IVF procedure, a woman’s egg is extracted, combined with sperm in a lab, and then put in the womb as an embryo.
However, azoospermia—a uncommon disorder in which the male partner’s semen contains no detectable sperm—caused this couple’s IVF treatments to fail and resulted in male infertility. Men with azoospermia have such low counts that, even after hours of careful examination under a microscope, no sperm cells can be detected in a standard semen sample, which contains hundreds of millions of sperm.
In order to preserve their privacy, the couple, who prefer to be unknown, decided to attempt a new strategy at the Columbia University Fertility Center.
This technique, known as the STAR method, employs artificial intelligence (AI) to enable men who previously believed they had no sperm find and recover their hidden sperm. The husband only needed to provide the medical staff with a sample of his semen.
In an email message, the wife stated, “After so many disappointments, we kept our hopes to a minimum.”
The AI system was used by researchers at the fertility center to analyze the semen sample. The woman became the first person to successfully conceive with the STAR procedure when three concealed sperm were located, recovered, and used to fertilize her eggs via IVF.
December is when the baby is due.
“I didn’t think I was pregnant for two days,” she said. I still find it hard to trust whether or not this is true when I get up in the morning. Until I see the scans, I still don’t think I’m pregnant.
In the United States, artificial intelligence has improved the field of reproductive care. More hospitals are utilizing AI to check for healthy embryos or evaluate the quality of eggs during IVF procedures. Though additional study and testing are required, AI may now be improving male infertility in particular.
The STAR method was developed over five years by Dr. Zev Williams, head of the Columbia University Fertility Center, and his colleagues to help identify and retrieve sperm in semen samples from individuals with azoospermia.
The system’s outcomes astounded them.
After a patient submitted a sample, two days were spent searching for sperm by highly qualified technicians. They failed to locate any. We took it to the STAR System, which is AI-powered. It detected forty-four sperm in one hour. At that moment, we saw that this was indeed a game-changer. According to Williams, who headed the research team, this will have a significant impact on patients.
The STAR system, which stands for Sperm Tracking and Recovery, uses a high-speed camera and powerful imaging technology to scan a semen sample placed on a specially made chip under a microscope. In less than an hour, it takes over 8 million pictures to identify what it has been trained to recognize as a sperm cell.
Embryologists can retrieve cells that they might not have been able to locate or recognize with their own eyes thanks to the system’s immediate isolation of that sperm cell into a tiny droplet of medium.
According to Williams, it’s like looking for a needle among a thousand haystacks, finishing the search in less than an hour, and doing it so delicately—without any dangerous lasers or stains—that the sperm can still be utilized to fertilize an egg.
What’s amazing is that these patients might have two or three sperm instead of the normal [200 million] to 300 million in a typical sample. He stated, “Not two [million] or three million, but literally two or three.” However, even those few are capable of successfully fertilizing an egg thanks to the accuracy of the STAR system and the knowledge of our embryologists.
Unexpected and startling diagnosis
Up to 40% of all cases of infertility in the US are thought to be caused by the male spouse, and up to 10% of infertile males are azoospermic.
According to Williams, this is frequently a very devastating, startling, and unanticipated diagnosis. The majority of men with azoospermia feel perfectly normal and healthy. Their sexual function is unaffected, and their semen appears to be normal. The distinction is that under a microscope, you observe cell fragments and debris but no sperm, rather than literally hundreds of millions of sperm swimming.
In the past, azoospermia has been treated with unpleasant surgery that removes sperm straight from the patient’s testes.
According to Williams, a portion of the testes is removed and split up into little bits, and you look for sperm there. It is intrusive. It hurts and can only be done a few times before the testes may become permanently damaged and scarred.
Prescription hormone drugs are another possible therapy option, but they won’t work unless the patient has a hormone imbalance. Couples may utilize donated sperm to conceive if no other forms of treatment work.
According to Williams, the STAR technique may be a novel choice.
“The fact that you can now help couples who otherwise couldn’t have that opportunity is what really drove and motivated everybody,” he said, adding that it was truly a team effort to achieve this.
Williams and his colleagues hope to publish their findings and distribute it to other reproductive institutions, even though the technique is presently exclusively accessible at the Columbia University reproductive Center. According to him, the total cost of finding, isolating, and freezing sperm for a patient using the STAR approach would be little under $3,000.
One thing that makes infertility special is how old it is in the human experience. It is literally found in the Bible. He claimed that it is something that we have faced throughout human history. It’s incredible to consider that this very old issue is being resolved with the most cutting-edge technology available today.
AI is enabling us to perceive things that our eyes cannot.
AI has previously been used by doctors to treat azoospermia in males.
An AI model that could automate and speed up the process of looking for uncommon sperm in samples from men with the disorder was developed by a different research team in Canada.
According to Dr. Sevann Helo, a urologist at the Mayo Clinic who specializes in male infertility and male sexual dysfunction and was not involved in the STAR method or the Canadian research, AI is ideally suited for this because it truly relies on learning by being shown an image of what a sperm looks like, what its shape is, and what characteristics it should have. Then, it can use that learning algorithm to help identify that specific image that you’re looking for.
“It’s really thrilling,” she said. In my opinion, artificial intelligence (AI) is a completely new field that will fundamentally change how we approach many medical issues.
According to Dr. Aimee Eyvazzadeh, a reproductive endocrinologist based in San Francisco and host of the podcast The Egg Whisperer Show, artificial intelligence (AI) has been applied in fertility care in numerous ways, including the new STAR method for sperm identification.
In an email, Eyvazzadeh, who was not involved in the creation of STAR, stated that AI is enabling us to perceive things that our eyes cannot.
For example, early-stage embryos have been analyzed using AI systems like Stork-A, which have been used to forecast which ones are likely to be healthy with surprisingly high accuracy. Before a lady freezes her eggs for later use, another AI program called CHLOE can evaluate the quality of her eggs.
By using AI to customize IVF medication regimens, cycles are becoming less of a guessing game and more efficient. Additionally, it aids in sperm selection by locating the healthiest sperm, even in challenging samples. According to Eyvazzadeh, AI can now more accurately forecast IVF success rates than ever before, using enormous data sets to provide patients with individualized advice. The recurring theme? Better choices, increased self-assurance, and a more sympathetic encounter for patients.
According to her, the new STAR system is revolutionary.
According to her, AI isn’t producing sperm; rather, it’s assisting humans in locating the few, viable ones that are already present but hardly noticeable. It is a breakthrough because it enhances human skill rather than replaces it, and that is the way fertility treatment will develop in the future.
But there is also a growing concern that the rushed application of AI in reproductive medicine could give false hope to patients, said Dr. Gianpiero Palermo, professor of embryology and director of andrology and assisted fertilization at Weill Cornell Medicine.
According to Palermo’s email, artificial intelligence (AI) is becoming increasingly popular these days for providing objective assessments of embryos based on their morphology. Nevertheless, the models that are now available need more validation because they are still a little inconsistent.
According to Palermo, the STAR method still requires validation and would include human embryologists harvesting sperm and injecting them into an egg to produce an embryo for IVF patients.
Maybe the AI addition may help to retrieve the spermatozoon a little faster and maybe one more than the embryologist, said Palermo, who was not involved in the development of STAR but was the first to describe the method of injecting sperm directly into an egg. Since he invented that technique, it has grown to be the most widely used assisted reproductive technology globally.
In my opinion, this approach is faulty because inevitably some men will have no spermatozoa, Palermo said of the STAR method, doesn t matter how their specimens are screened whether by humans or a machine.
