The first babies conceived with a sperm-injecting robot have been born

Authored by technologyreview.com and submitted by Sariel007
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An AutoIVF executive, Emre Ozkumur, declined to discuss the project—the company wants to “stay under the radar a little bit longer,” he says—but its grant and patent documents suggest it is testing a device that can spot and isolate eggs and then automatically strip them of surrounding tissue, perhaps by swishing them through something that resembles a microscopic cheese grater.

Once an egg is in hand, doctors need to match it with a sperm cell. To help them pick the right one, Alejandro Chavez-Badiola, a fertility doctor based in Mexico, started a company, IVF 2.0, that developed software to rank and analyze sperm swimming in a dish. It’s similar to computer-vision programs that track sports players as they run, collide, and switch directions on a pitch.

The job is to identify healthy sperm by assessing their shape and seeing how well they swim. “Motility,” says Chavez-Badiola, “is the ultimate expression of sperm health and normality.” While a person can only keep an eye on a few sperm at one time, a computer doesn’t face that limit. “We humans are good at channeling our attention to a single point. We can assess five or 10 sperm, but you can’t do 50,” says Chavez-Badiola.

His IVF clinic is running a head-to-head study of human- and computer-picked sperm, to see which lead to more babies. So far, the computer holds a small edge.

“We don’t claim it’s better than a human, but we do claim it’s just as good. And it never gets tired. A human has to be good at 8 a.m., after coffee, after having an argument on the phone,” he says.

Chavez-Badiola says such software will be “the brains to command future automated labs.” This year, he sold the rights to use his sperm-tracking program to Conceivable Life Sciences, another IVF automation startup being formed in New York where Chavez-Badiola will act as chief product officer. Also joining the company is Jacques Cohen, a celebrated embryologist who once worked at the British clinic where the first IVF baby was born in 1978.

A computer system developed by IVF 2.0 tracks and grades sperm as they swim, using image-recognition software. CONCEIVABLE

Conceivable plans to create an “autonomous” robotic workstation that can fertilize eggs and cultivate embryos, and it hopes to demonstrate all the key steps this year. But Cohen allows that automation could take a while to become reality. “It will happen step by step,” he says. “Even things that seem obvious take 10 years to catch on, and 20 to become routine.”

The investors behind Conceivable think they can cash in by expanding the use of IVF. It’s nearly certain that the IVF industry could grow to five or 10 times its current size. In the US, fewer than 2% of kids are born this way, but in Denmark, where the procedure is free and encouraged, the figure is near 10%.

Alarmed_Letterhead26 on April 25th, 2023 at 21:15 UTC »

I hope it's name is creampAI.

compuwiza1 on April 25th, 2023 at 20:26 UTC »

Homer Simpson thought artificial insemination meant doing it with a robot. Now it apparently does!

Ulpian02 on April 25th, 2023 at 20:23 UTC »

Fucking automation taking my job