World’s First AI Tool to Grade Women's Eggs for IVF

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Today Future Fertility, a Toronto-based biotech startup, announced the world’s first artificial intelligence (AI) tool for objectively and non-invasively evaluating human eggs to predict in vitro fertilization (IVF) success with 90 percent accuracy.

Since the birth of the world’s first test-tube baby, Louise Brown, in 1978, there have been over 8 million babies born by in vitro fertilization an assisted reproduction technology where a woman’s egg is fertilized by sperm in a laboratory dish.

Infertility impacts around 6.7 million women in the U.S. according to estimates from the American Society for Reproductive Medicine (ASRM). Globally, the in vitro fertilization (IVF) market size is projected to reach USD 36.2 billion by 2026 according to a March 2019 report by Grand View Research.

Fertility treatment is a costly endeavor: The average cost of one just one cycle of IVF starts at $12,400 USD, according to the American Society of Reproductive Medicine. The chances of success on the first IVF cycle are not high. According to figures from RESOLVE, the National Infertility Association, the success rate for a single IVF cycle for women is 41 percent for ages under 35, 32 percent for ages 35 to 37, and only 22 percent for ages 38 to 40.

To have an AI-enabled method to improve the odds of IVF success by evaluating and scoring women’s eggs offers a cost-effective and objective way to optimize success. Future Fertility created a patent-pending AI machine learning tool named Violet. It is a non-invasive image analysis tool that can instantaneously analyze a woman’s egg quality, and predict the odds of IVF fertilization success from a single image taken from any standard light microscope that is present in every IVF laboratory.

Violet uses data from IVF clinics globally in order to continuously enhance its diagnostic and predictive capabilities. The solutions offer standardized scoring of egg quality. Violet also predicts the odds of the egg becoming a blastocyst with nearly 65 percent accuracy.

"With the accumulation of big data, including images of eggs and their respective outcomes, and the application of AI technology, we have finally made a huge leap forward to be able to evaluate eggs and ultimately work toward improving fertility outcomes,” said Dan Nayot, a reproductive endocrinologist at TRIO Fertility and co-founder of Future Fertility in a company report.

Given the combination of the low average success rate and high cost of IVF, to have a non-invasive diagnostic and predictive tool such as Violet is a giant leap towards improving the odds of success—potentially bringing new hope for infertile couples who are trying to conceive in the future.

Copyright © 2019 Cami Rosso All rights reserved.