Ovation Fertility™ is first IVF service provider in the United States to evaluate artificial intelligence to help improve pregnancy outcomes
Ovation Fertility has become the first IVF service provider in the US to evaluate a new artificial intelligence technology to determine if it may help improve pregnancy outcomes for its patients. In partnership with Australian-based AI company Life Whisperer, Ovation Fertility will conduct a retrospective study to assess whether the AI could have identified embryos that would have led to a successful pregnancy.
Tex VerMilyea, Ph.D., Ovation Fertility’s Austin Laboratory & Operations Director said: “While Ovation Fertility currently considers preimplantation genetic screening (PGS) the gold standard for selecting embryos for transfer, PGS is not always an option for every patient. Our skilled embryologists excel at visually grading embryos for transfer, and we’re interested in evaluating AI’s potential as a supplemental decision-support tool for validating our embryologists’ findings on which embryos might be most likely to result in pregnancy.”
In this trial, deidentified photos of day 5, 6 and 7 embryos will be reviewed by the AI technology. The retrospective analysis will correlate the AI’s analysis of each embryo photo with its known pregnancy outcome.
Recently Life Whisperer demonstrated through a patient study in Australia that its AI performed significantly better than experienced embryologists at identifying viable embryos from medical images, a critical success factor for couples undergoing IVF.
In a cohort of almost 600 patient cycles in Australia, Life Whisperer’s AI was pitted against highly trained and experienced embryologists to determine which embryos would lead to a successful pregnancy. Life Whisperer’s AI was shown to perform over 30% more accurately than embryologists participating in the study in identifying embryo viability. In one cohort of patients, Life Whisperer showed a 53% improvement over embryologists.
Life Whisperer’s Co-founder Dr Michelle Perugini said: “Life Whisperer is using deep learning and computer vision to identify complex morphology of embryos, which cannot be seen through a microscope. These results are exciting and show that Life Whisperer will enable embryologists to identify the best embryos to use. We believe this will be a game changer for the IVF industry.”
Life Whisperer is a non-invasive, scalable and secure web-based tool that can be utilized by IVF clinics globally. Clinicians can simply “drag and drop” patient embryo images taken from a standard microscope camera and receive an instant report as to the embryo viability to inform their decision of which embryo to implant into the patient.
Life Whisperer plans to launch the product in the US market second half of 2018.
For more information about the press release email Info@LifeWhisperer.co or contact Dr. Michelle Perugini on +61 412 396 960.