Artificial Intelligence (AI) has become an effective tool for measuring predicted data in IVF testing across Australia, helping improve the demands of embryo-selection and its outcomes, according to a new study.
Embryo-selection has been increased by AI due to its capacity to detect specific embryo patterns, calculate blastocyst morphology and cycle times, and its ability to review clinical data specific to individual patients, to combat the long-standing difficulties associated with embryo-selection.
A study by the Australian Alliance for Artificial Intelligence in Healthcare found that AI is ten times faster at selecting embryos than a human embryologist.
IVF Australia Associate Professor Gavin Sacs said AI has been able to capture embryo growth more efficiently.
“The AI is trained on historical data to identify patterns in which embryos worked and which didn’t. It’s impossible for a human to analyse so much data,” he said.
According to the National Institute of Health study, the AI model FiTTE correctly predicted IVF clinical pregnancy outcomes in 65.2% of cases.
Source: Contraception and Reproductive Medicine
The model had a 0.7 per cent Area Under Curve (AUC) result meaning it performed significantly better than chance at distinguishing between viable and non-viable embryos.
Technical Officer at Genea embryology lab Olivia Rensford said AI will improve the efficiency of their work and allow for a more decisive analysis.
“A lot of the AI will cut down man hours and things that are a lot of searching within our day to day,” she said.
“It’s very labour intensive to have an individual person sit down and scan through everything so if you can train an AI model to find things, then I think that is an incredible feat.”
The Australian and New Zealand Reproductive Database (ANZARD) has shown a 50 per cent increase of live birth rates from frozen embryo transfers over the last decade.
Source: Australian and New Zealand Reproductive Database (ANZARD)
The data has stated that “each year approximately twenty-thousand babies are born from IVF in Australia; representing one in eighteen children, rising to one in ten children born to mothers ages thirty-five years and older.”
AI integration continues to improve outcomes in IVF clinics across Australia, paving the way for future advancements in reproductive medicine.
