Fertility Road Announces Exclusive Global Partnership With AI Company Life Whisperer
A new partnership brings together two leaders in the global fertility market and paves the way for a leap forward in the way scientists choose the most viable embryos in the IVF selection process.
Fertility Road is the world’s leading preconception platform for patients and has, over a decade been at the forefront of promoting emerging technologies, treatments and support to fertility patients across the globe. Working across five continents Fertility Road has an extensive network of clinic partners and interacted with over one million patients worldwide over the last year.
Life Whisperer, the fertility arm of AI healthcare company Presagen, which operates out of San Francisco, Adelaide (South Australia), and London are at the cutting edge of artificial intelligence fertility research and application. The latest application to roll out of the company’s rapidly emerging portfolio of femtech related technologies uses AI to analyze microscope images of embryos to assist clinicians to identify which embryo will likely lead to a pregnancy. By selecting the best embryo, Life Whisperer aims to shorten the time to pregnancy and improve outcomes for couples undergoing IVF treatment.
Life Whisperer recently completed an international clinical study across 12 clinics in 4 countries, including the United States, Australia, New Zealand, and Malaysia. The results demonstrated that the AI platform was 25 percent more accurate than highly trained and experienced embryologists in identifying the most viable embryos from the medical images of almost 1,600 patient cycles. The results of the research will be published in the top-ranking journal Human Reproduction in March 2020.
Life Whisperer is already commercially available for patients in Australia, and with the help of Fertility Road, it will be launching across Europe in March 2020. It is also currently seeking regulatory approval in the USA and Asia.
It is hoped this technology will help address the decline in fertility rates globally and increase success rates in fertility clinics which have remained fairly static over the last decade. The solution employs a combination of computer vision and machine learning techniques to help rank and identify healthy embryos for implantation, thereby significantly increasing the chances of a successful pregnancy.
During the IVF process, eggs are fertilized and develop into embryos. At this point, a clinician (embryologist) needs to decide which embryo to transfer into the patient. Manual selection of embryos is difficult, highly subjective and limited to what the eye can see down a microscope.
The Life Whisperer application allows clinicians to drag and drop single images of patient embryos taken immediately prior to transfer and returns an instant report as to the viability of each embryo to support the clinician’s decision about which embryo to transfer. Unlike other solutions, Life Whisperer’s web-based approach is non-invasive, does not require specialized time-lapse imaging hardware (although can operate on time-lapse images), requires little process change in the clinic, and can be delivered at a low cost to patients.
Fertility Road Co-Founder, Tone Jarvis-Mack says, “Life Whisperer has the technology, Fertility Road has the network. Together we hope to introduce this amazing technology to more fertility clinics around the world. We believe by using this enhanced tool Embryologists will, universally, be able to identify the best embryos and consequently increase the chances of treatment being successful. This technology is a game-changer and is one of the most exciting initiatives in IVF technology for some time”.
Source: EIN PRESSWIRE