Dr. Steven Vasilescu, a biomedical engineer at the University of Technology Sydney (UTS) and the founder of NeoGenix Biosciences, has developed an artificial intelligence (AI) tool that could revolutionize the treatment of infertility and remedy low sperm count in males faster.
The AI tool called SpermSearch is a cutting-edge AI system designed to aid in the identification of viable sperm in semen samples, specifically focusing on men with a condition known as non-obstructive azoospermia (NOA), where they have no sperm in their ejaculate. Traditionally, embryologists would manually search for healthy sperm by surgically removing a portion of the testes, a time-consuming and potentially inaccurate process that could take several hours.
SpermSearch, however, can analyse and identify healthy sperm within seconds by processing images of the samples immediately uploaded to the computer. To achieve this remarkable speed, Dr. Vasilescu and his team trained the AI by exposing it to thousands of images of sperm within complex tissue samples.
“It can highlight a potentially viable sperm before a human can even process what they’re looking at,” he says.
In a scientific paper published by the UTS biomedical engineering team, SpermSearch was found to be 1,000 times faster than an experienced embryologist.
