PFI-TT: Development of Metabolic Imaging to Improve Treatment of Infertility

这个PFI项目的更广泛的影响/商业潜力主要是推进系统的商业化，以改善临床体外受精（IVF）。体外受精是目前治疗不孕症最有效的方法，但体外受精的成功率仍然很低，只有约30%的周期能活产，这反过来又导致了高昂的经济和情感成本。提高试管婴儿成功率将有助于试管婴儿患者和大约10%患有不孕症的夫妇，并将带来广泛的社会和经济效益。本研究利用先进的成像技术和计算图像分析技术，将生物学、物理学、工程学、临床医学和商业化紧密结合。本科生、研究生和博士后将受益于这种跨学科的环境和训练。这一努力将有助于增加妇女和代表性不足的少数民族对科学、创新和技术商业化的参与。拟议的项目测试和发展代谢成像作为一种无创测量卵母细胞质量的手段。卵母细胞代谢成像对提高IVF成功率具有很大的希望：目前无法确定卵母细胞质量是更好的IVF治疗的主要障碍之一，而卵母细胞质量被认为是由卵母细胞代谢决定的。先前和初步数据表明，代谢成像不会损害小鼠卵母细胞，并且可以用于测量不同小鼠卵母细胞之间具有生物学意义的代谢差异。拟议的项目将扩展这项工作，以调查该技术在体外成熟的人类卵母细胞（临床无用，否则丢弃的材料）上的安全性和实用性。在尝试在临床环境中使用代谢成像之前，有必要进行此类安全性测试。这项工作还将提供有关人类卵母细胞代谢的信息，这对发育，不育和出生缺陷具有重要的基础意义。此外，临床仪器必须是强大的，并集成到临床工作流程。一个关键的挑战是图像和数据分析。因此，该项目还寻求开发和验证全自动图像和数据分析程序。该奖项反映了美国国家科学基金会的法定使命，并通过使用基金会的知识价值和更广泛的影响审查标准进行评估，被认为值得支持。

The broader impact/commercial potential of this PFI project is primarily the advancement of the commercialization of a system to improve clinical in vitro fertilization (IVF). IVF is currently the most effective treatment for infertility, but success rates for IVF remain low, with only ~30% of cycles resulting in live birth which, in turn, leads to high financial and emotional costs. Improving the success rate of IVF would help IVF patients and the approximately 10% of couples who suffer from infertility, and would lead to broad societal and economic benefit. The proposed work makes use of advanced imaging and computational image analysis, and has a tight integration between biology, physics, engineering, clinical medicine, and commercialization. Undergraduate, graduate students, and postdocs, will benefit from this interdisciplinary environment and training. This effort will help increase the involvement of women and underrepresented minorities in science, innovation, and technological commercialization.The proposed project tests and develops the use of metabolic imaging as a means to non-invasively measure oocyte quality. Metabolic imaging of oocytes holds great promise for improving IVF success rates: the current inability to determine oocyte quality is one of the major impediments to better IVF treatment, and oocyte quality is believed to be determined by oocyte metabolism. Previous and preliminary data demonstrated that metabolic imaging does not harm mouse oocytes and that it can be used to measure biologically meaningful metabolic differences between different mouse oocytes. The proposed project will expand on that work to investigate the safety and utility of the technology on in vitro matured human oocytes (clinically useless, otherwise discarded material). It is necessary to perform such safety tests before attempting to use metabolic imaging in a clinical setting. This work will also provide information on the metabolism of human oocytes, which is of fundamental import, with broad application for development, infertility, and birth defects. Furthermore, a clinical instrument must be robust and integrate into the clinical workflow. A key challenge is image and data analysis. Thus, this project also seeks to develop and validate fully automated image and data analysis procedures.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.