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Mumbai: Scientists have developed a novel tool using Artificial Intelligence (AI) that they believe can help treat male infertility faster than Embryologists.
Infertility is a medical problem that affects 7% of the male population across the globe.
According to Dr Steven Vasilescu, the AI programme, SpermSearch, he and his colleagues built can identify sperm in samples from extremely infertile men 1,000 times faster than a pair of highly trained eyes.
"SpermSearch can highlight a potentially viable sperm before a human can even process what they're looking at," he said.
Dr Vasilescu, a Biomedical Engineer at University of Technology Sydney (UTS) in Australia, is the founder of NeoGenix Biosciences, a medical firm. SpermSearch is name of the system he and his colleagues have developed, according to BBC.
The system is capable of assisting men who, like 10% of infertile men, have absolutely no sperm in their ejaculate, a condition known as non-obstructive azoospermia (NOA).
Typically, a little bit of the testes is surgically removed in these situations which is then transported to a lab so that an embryologist can manually look for viable sperm.
The tissue is dissected and then looked at under a microscope. It is possible to harvest and inject viable sperm into an egg if any are discovered.
According to Dr Vasilescu, this process can take many employees six or seven hours, and there is a risk of exhaustion and accuracy.
"When an embryologist looks down the microscope, what they see is just this complete mess - a starscape of cells." "There's blood and tissue. There might be only 10 sperm in the whole thing, but there can be millions of other cells. It's a needle in a haystack," Dr Vasilescu said.
"When an embryologist looks down the microscope, what they see is just this complete mess - a starscape of cells."
"There's blood and tissue. There might be only 10 sperm in the whole thing, but there can be millions of other cells. It's a needle in a haystack," Dr Vasilescu said.
On the contrary, Dr Vasilescu claimed, SpermSearch can quickly locate any healthy sperm when photos of the samples are promptly uploaded to the computer.
Dr Vasilescu and his associates taught AI to recognise sperm in these intricate tissue samples by exposing it to hundreds of similar photos in order to reach this speed.
The UTS biomedical engineering team reported that in a test SpermSearch was 1,000 times quicker than an expert embryologist in the published scientific study.
SpermSearch is a useful tool, but it is not intended to take the role of embryologists.
According to Dr Sarah Martins da Silva such speed in finding any sperm is vital.
"Time is critical," said the clinical reader in reproductive medicine at the University of Dundee. "If you've got somebody that's had an egg collection, and you've got eggs that need to be fertilised, there's only a small time window for us to be able to do that. Speeding up the process would be hugely advantageous", she added.
"Time is critical," said the clinical reader in reproductive medicine at the University of Dundee.
"If you've got somebody that's had an egg collection, and you've got eggs that need to be fertilised, there's only a small time window for us to be able to do that. Speeding up the process would be hugely advantageous", she added.
Infertility is still an issue of concern with sperm counts appear to have fallen by 50% over the past fifty years.
According to reports, there are a variety of factors contributing to the decline in male fertility, from smoking and pollution to bad diets, insufficient exercise, and excessive stress.
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