AI helps find viable sperm in minutes, giving hope to couples after years of infertility

Using AI to analyze millions of images, Columbia University researchers rapidly identified viable sperm in men with severe infertility, offering new hope for biological parenthood.

It happened only 12 weeks ago. A doomed sperm successfully reached an egg, and now a couple is expecting their first child. A moment they’ve been longing for after 18 years of trying to conceive.

It’s no miracle, but tech – researchers from the Columbia University Fertility Center used AI to find viable sperm. The principle isn’t news, and it’s familiar with the usual in-vitro fertilization where medical personnel take sperm from a semen sample and then fertilize an egg.

However, it’s different for men who suffer from azoospermia – a condition that causes extremely low sperm counts. In those cases, viable sperm is extremely difficult to find, and even if it were, the chance of damaging it through existing methods of searching remains high.

However, fertility specialists from Columbia University took a different path. By using a tiny camera, they were able to capture millions of images in a semen sample and get it to AI to do the sourcing. What normally takes days for a person took only took up a few minutes of AI’s time. The result? A speedy extraction of the sperm that could at last fertilize an egg.

“Labs searched for two days and found nothing. We ran the same sample and found 44 sperm within an hour. That changes everything for a couple who thought they had no path forward,” - said to the Washington Post Zev Williams, director of Columbia’s fertility program.

The process begins by placing a semen sample onto a small chip that channels the fluid in a controlled manner. As the sample moves through, it’s illuminated and captured by a microscope that’s connected to a high-speed camera. The system records millions of individual frames, which artificial intelligence analyzes in real time to detect sperm. In milliseconds it isolates them.

According to researchers, this is the first-known use of AI-enabled conception using this particular technology.

While AI has long been used in other ways to assist couples who want a baby, including assessing embryo viability, Columbia’s work shows how the technology can offer a chance at biological parenthood for those experiencing severe male infertility.