AI tools help choose best embryos for IVF

AFP | Paris

Email : editor@newsofbahrain.com

Artificial intelligence tools can now help choose the most promising embryos for in vitro fertilisation (IVF), although experts have warned of some ethical concerns.

Procedures such as IVF allow millions of children to be born across the world each year to parents who have otherwise struggled to conceive.

However the success rate of the procedure, which involves creating an embryo by fertilising an egg with sperm in the lab, can vary widely and declines with age.

Now, almost 50 years after the first IVF child was born, “artificial intelligence is here to help us select better embryos or at least help determine their potential for implantation”, Nathalie Massin, the head of the clinical unit of an IVF centre at the American Hospital of Paris, told AFP.

The facility in the French capital carries out more than 2,300 IVF procedures every year. It is equipped with an embryoscope, which works as a timelapse camera that continuously films the development of the embryos.

The data recorded by the camera -- such as the shape, symmetry and cell division of the embryo -- had previously only been used to a limited extent.

But tools using AI such as machine learning have been shown to help doctors select the embryos that have the best chance of being successfully implanted or frozen for later.