High Accuracy Vision System with Enhanced AI algorithm for IVF ICSI Process

点击翻译按钮获取中文摘要

Highly accurate vision camera system with enhanced AI algorithm to assist in automated ICSI process for IVF treatment.Infertility affects 3.5m people in the UK, 186m worldwide and is the most common healthcare condition for 30-40-year-olds, with 106 IVF clinics in the UK and over 5000 worldwide. It is estimated that approximately 10% of women globally are affected, with ~14% of couples in their reproductive age facing challenges. This is expected to rise due to individuals delaying having children and low sperm counts in men becoming more common. Individuals with fertility issues are also at a higher risk of anxiety and depression.Despite the huge problem, the most common and effective type of assisted reproductive technology (ART); in-vitro fertilisation (IVF) has seen no significant improvements in 25+ years. During the current process embryologists select the best sperm available and fertilise eggs by manual injection via microscope-mounted electromechanical micromanipulator using joysticks. This process depends on individual skill, and can result in poor control/accuracy during injection, procedural inconsistency, egg damage and inevitable human error. This leads to low success rates (~30%) and patients requiring several cycles/procedures before conception@£10k-12K per-cycle. This issue is worsened by a lack of highly-skilled embryologists resulting in long waiting lists and poor pregnancy rates. New technologies are essential to increase fertilisation success rates, increase profitability for clinics and cost-effectiveness for the NHS.In collaboration with University of Birmingham and £600k grant funding (IUK, EPSRC, MRC), Myma Medical has designed AutoICSI; a first-of-its-kind automated ICSI system. AutoICSI is currently at TRL4, proof of concept has demonstrated a reduction in egg damage (upto 10%), human error and improved inconsistencies between embryologists, leading to a 10% increase in fertilisation success rate compared with current IVF.The high accuracy vision camera system with enhanced AI algorithm will significantly improve performance of AutoICSI system by making it easier for the micro-pipette to track, immobilise and pick up the most conforming sperm for injection into the egg.