One in four couples in developing countries is impacted by infertility. Today, infertility is rapidly becoming an epidemic. Almost 50 million couples experience it worldwide. This is why in vitro fertilization (IVF) is becoming more and more popular. The first baby conceived using IVF was born more than 40 years ago. Since then, there have been plenty of advances in this field. Unfortunately, for many patients facing fertility issues, the journey to parenthood via IVF is still extremely challenging and expensive. One cycle of IVF treatment costs roughly $12,000-$14,000. This is a quarter of the average yearly salary in the US. Although, the success rate of IVF treatment in 2022 reached 47.2% for women aged less than 35 years old, paying a quarter of your yearly salary for less than 50% of success is not quite ideal. This is the reason why scientists were working on further advancements. There came an idea. Nowadays, AI is present in almost every area of our lives. It helps improve our quality of life. Therefore, doctors have started to try to apply it in IVF. I do not want to tell you about all of the new technologies that show how the appliance of AI to IVF can improve the whole process, but I want to focus on one that really deserves your attention.
It is called Life Whisperer and it was nivented by Indira IVF, India’s most advanced and largest IVF clinic. In order to improve pregnancy outcomes, Indira IVF will offer this Artificial Intelligence technology to all its patients. From November 2022, Indira IVF will implement Artificial Intelligence technology across its 100+ clinics in India. Several international clinical studies have shown that Life Whisperer’s newest technology helps women become pregnant sooner and more affordably than ever before.
But how does Life Whisperer exactly work? By analyzing images of patient embryos, the technology helps embryologists select those embryos that have the best chance of succeeding. It assesses two of an embryo’s quality metrics. The first one is called Life Whisperer Viability and it assesses how likely an embryo is to lead to a pregnancy. The second one is called Life Whisperer Genetics and it non-invasively assesses an embryo’s genetic integrity.
When it comes to the downsides of using Artificial Intelligence in IVF, there are two main problems. Firstly, these algorithms focus only on choosing the best quality egg/sperm/embryo, they do not guarantee that fertilization will result in a healthy pregnancy. Moreover, they do not guarantee that the baby conceived using these technologies will not have any future health concerns. Secondly, one of the challenges facing learning AI is that it evolves with data rather than being transparent and interpretable in its inner workings. This is often approached with apprehension as ‘black box’ machines. The last decade has seen significant progress in disentangling, guiding, and evaluating artificial intelligence. However, these algorithms know as much as we let them understand, but they lack the work experience and intuition that human doctors possess. This is why many doctors state that AI in IVF will not bring better results than human professionals can.
I do not agree with this statement. I think that Artificial Intelligence can improve the quality of in vitro fertilization. Furthermore, it can make it more affordable. Therefore more accessible for people earning average or below average salaries. Last but not least, I believe that using Artificial Intelligence in IVF can improve the success rate of IVF treatments. This would be the greatest achievement in this field because the ratio of in vitro price to its success rate is not high enough in my opinion. What do you think? Let me know in the comments.
References:
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8801019/
https://www.ivf.com.au/success-rates/our-laboratories/ivy-artificial-intelligence-in-ivf