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Times of India of 30th July 2025 in its 'Technology for Health' series quotes Cleveland Clinic and DrZevWilliams and presents the article 'After 19 years of trying for a baby, this couple lost hope.But AI made it happen'
In a first, AI has helped a woman to become pregnant. Azoospermia (no detectable sperm in ejaculate) had been preventing it for 19 years, though the couple had been through 15 failed IVF cycles. The Technology adopted is called Sperm Track and Recovery (STAR) system.
The Columbia University Fertility Center developed STAR to detect "really, really, really rare sperm", the kind lab technicians fail to find in azoospermia samples. Dr.Dev Williams, Director, Columbia University Fertility Center ans STAR developer told Times Magazine, "I liken it to finding a needle hidden within a thousand haystacks. But it can do that in a couple of hours - and so gently that the sperm that we recover can be utilised to fertilise an egg."
For five years, Williams and his team perfected the system using a sperm-detecting AI algorithm. The process starts with a fluidic chip flowing the semen sample through a small tube on a plastic chip. Once AI confirms sperm presence, that bit of semen is diverted to a separate tube. Whataever few sperm there are in the sample can be isolated in such a way that could either be used to fertilise an egg or frozen for later use.
That's exactly what Williams and his team did for the couple. Just two hours after collecting the husband's sperm, they got to know the wife's eggs had been successfully fertilised, ready for transfer to the uterus in a few days. The wife is four months pregnant now and the both the mother and the fetus are doing welL.
Columbia University Fertility Center says the STAR system is a groundbreaking advancement for men diagnosed with azoozspermia adding, "This system can detect and retrieve even the smallest numbers of sperm gently and without harsh chemicals or lasers, using cutting edge AI, high speed imaging and robotics.Azoospermia affects around 1% of all men and accounts for 10% of all male fertility issues. The most common cause of the condition is a blockage in the male reproductive tract.
What makes STAR ahead is tha it can successfully isolate the sperm in a semen sample where male infertility is involved. The interesting fact is when embryologists had worked hard for two days in analysing one of the semen samples and couldn't find any sperm STAR had found 44 in an hour.
The dream of the scientists is to advise people with no hope of having a child, they can go on and have healthy children.
