An Israeli startup has found a way to make fertility treatments more successful using Artificial Intelligence.

Embryonics has already seen no less than 6 full term pregnancies as a result of their novel system.

Doctors will often inseminate a female egg in a laboratory – a process known as In Vitro Fertilization. During first few days after the fertilization, the embryos will be housed in special incubators and watched continuously by an embryologist.

This embryologist will then return some of the embryos for in-human incubation. This is where it gets interesting because they have to choose what they feel are the most valuable embryos.

“The decision making is subjective, and is dependent on experience and intuition – a factor that changes between doctors and medical centers. Embryonics wide range of smart solutions simplifies complex processes with data-backed insight, aiming at optimizing quality and fertilizations rate success,” says Embryonics founder and CEO Yael Gold-Zamir.

The company says that the success rate of traditional methods of IVF carries a 30% success rate within the US, and that the success rate is even lower outside the US.

The company developed AI algorithms that help predict the likely success rate of fertility and IVF treatments. This takes a lot of the guesswork out of the selection process.

To train the model, scientists watched embryos developing during IVF treatment. As a result, the embryo-pregnancy success rate shot up by 20% and the model allowed doctors to predict the embryos that would not yield a successful pregnancy.

This difference is significant because it saves IVF patients a significant amount of money by making the process more efficient. By increasing the chances of success, it also saves patients from the emotional toll of unsuccessful IVF attempts.

Test Tube Babies become AI Babies

According to Dr. Gold-Zamir, Embryonics has come up with Ubar, the first commercially viable product that more accurately pinpoints healthy embryos.

It won’t be long before Embryonics’ product is in the market: The product could be CE cleared in a matter of weeks, and FDA approved within the year.

“Once regulatory approvals are in, we will start implementing the product in a number of Israeli medical centers that showed interest.”

“It’s a revolution. Traditional fertility treatments resulted in very low success rate. We are going to replace IVF test-tube babies with AI babies – a transition that will create a process that is shorter, cheaper, and less dangerous for millions of couples around the world.” Adds Zamir.

If we go by the findings of Israeli startups like Embryonics, AIDOC, and Zebra, you may be forgiven for thinking that AI medical imaging analysis may replace specialist like radiologists and embryologists in the near future.

But Dr. Gold-Zamir differs: “Algorithms will take over some of the radiologist’s tasks, opening more time for physicians to take a deeper dice into patient care. But that’s further down the road. Currently, all the available tools aid and improve radiologist and doctors’ workflow and quality, with tools trained in millions of different sample sources – a database too large for humans to process.”

The effect of Artificial Intelligence it appears, will be to make medical experts more accurate in their diagnoses, and not to replace them.

Dr. Yael Gold-Zamir founded Embryonics in 2018 and the company has grown to its current composition of 16 people. Embryonics has raised a $4million round of funding with the Schuctermann Family Investment Office as well as the Israel Innovation Authority.

Scientists now believe that it may be possible to identify people who have a greater risk of developing Alzheimer’s disease by testing their memory over a four-week period.

Trials have shown that zeroing in on the ability to retain a memory over a longer period could yield potentially more accurate predictors than the traditional memory tests. Traditional memory tests assess people’s memory over a period of half an hour.

University of Bristol researchers led the study which they published in the Alzheimer’s Research and Therapy journal in which they wanted to test using a word list to test people’s memory over four weeks. People were tested for their memory of the list four weeks after hearing it initially.

Those whose memory of the list after four weeks was better off, registered less cognitive decline over the year after. This was true even for those who did not have any problems with cognitive function or memory at the start.

Forty six older people participated in the study. All of them were healthy and their average age was 70.7. The study participants had to perform three memory tasks. Researchers tested t heir delayed recall 30 minutes later and then four weeks later.

They also did the Addenbrooke’s Cognitive Examination III or ACE-III test. ACE-III test is conventionally used to detect cognitive impairments, as well as a brain MRI. One year later, the participants repeated the same ACE-III test to measure their cognitive abilities.

At the end of the study, researchers found that 15 out of 46 participants had experienced a decline in their cognitive abilities, and that the verbal memory tests conducted over the initial period of four weeks would have yielded a better prediction of this decline than the standard memory tests.

After combining the scores from the four-week memory tests together with the results of the MRI brain scan, the researchers found that it was possible to make even more accurate prediction s of cognitive decline.

The MRI brain scans showed that there was a size reduction in the section of the brain that governs memory. This is the part of the brain that gets affected by Alzheimer’s Disease.

By testing long-term memory recall, the researchers found that they could detect Alzheimer’s disease much earlier and achieve better treatment outcomes. Treatments to stop Alzheimer’s disease or slow down its progression are much more effective when given during the early stages of the disease. This is the best time because patients are yet to develop significant problems with their memory.

In the words of Dr. Alfie Wearn, a Research Associate at the Bristol Medical School: Translational Health Sciences: “Our study shows evidence for a low-cost and quick to administer screening tool that could be used to identify the very earliest signs of Alzheimer’s disease. It could also directly speed up the development of effective Alzheimer’s disease therapies, and enable earlier treatment when such therapies are available.”

Dr. Liz Coulthard who is an Associate Professor in Dementia Neurology with the University of Bristol as well as a neurologist with the North Bristol NHS Trust also said this: “It is important to note the participants were healthy older people who did not develop Alzheimer’s during the trial, but some people did show the type of change over the course of a year in memory and thinking that can precede Alzheimer’s disease. Future work will establish whether this test predicts full-blown Alzheimer’s dementia.”

Researchers will now be testing the ability of these tests to detect Alzheimer’s disease in comparison with other cognitive deteriorating diseases. The researchers will be drawing comparisons between long-term memory test results of people who have evidence of Alzheimer’s disease and those without. The evidence is derived from analyzing their cerebrospinal fluid. Even though this method of detecting Alzheimer’s is the most effective, it is also too invasive, and researchers are working on less invasive methods.

The study was conducted with funding from a Wellcome Trust PhD study scholarship award received by Dr. Wearn who is in the Neural Dynamics PhD Programme. It was also funded by the Alzheimer’s Research UK as well as Brace, which is a dementia charity at Southmead Hospital in Bristol.

A study conducted by the University College London has shown that we can detect viruses earlier by exploiting nanodiamonds’ quantum properties to make paper-based diagnostic testing more sensitive.

The innovation could pave the way for viruses like SARS-CoV-2 and HIV to be detected earlier.

Paper-based diagnostic testing works the same way pregnancy tests work, by soaking a strip of paper in a liquid and waiting for a fluorescent signal or a color transformation to denote positive results, or the presence of virus proteins.

England is already piloting lateral flow testing for Covid-19 which deliver immediate results as they do not require laboratory processing. Lateral flow testing is popular for detecting viruses like HIV.

HIV tests lateral flow tests utilize gold nanoparticles which are not as sensitive as nanodiamonds which are capable of detecting much lower viral loads than gold nanoparticles. If this is widely accepted, it will become possible to detect viruses much earlier and reduce the risk of transmission.

“Our proof-of-concept study shows how quantum technologies can be used to detect ultralow levels of virus in a patient sample, enabling much earlier diagnosis,” explained Professor Rachel McKendry, lead author of the Nature study. “We have focused on the detection of HIV, but our approach is very flexible and can be easily adapted to other diseases and biomarker types.

“We are working on adapting our approach to Covid-19. We believe that this transformative new technology will benefit patients and protect populations from infectious diseases.”

The study leveraged the quantum properties of nanodiamonds that carried a defect which creates a nitrogen-vacancy center (NV). These NV centers can be used for fluorescent biomarking which enables ultrasensitive imaging, quantum computing, information processing, and other applications.

The NV centers emit fluorescent lights which indicate the presence of target molecules. Nano diamonds’ quantum properties allow this signal to be set to its own unique frequency that separates it from background fluorescence.

What the UCL research has shown is that it is possible to improve the sensitivity of a HIV test by 100,000 times. A 10-minte temperature amplification which multiplies HIV RNA copies made it possible to detect HIV in a single molecule within the sample.

“Paper-based lateral flow tests with gold nanoparticles do not require laboratory analysis, making them particularly useful in low-resource settings and where access to healthcare is limited. They are low cost, portable, and user friendly” said lead author Dr. Ben Miller.

He added: “However, these tests currently lack the sensitivity to detect very low levels of biomarkers. By replacing commonly used gold nanoparticles with fluorescent nanodiamonds in this new design, and selectively modulating their (already bright) emission of light, we have been able to separate their signal from the unwanted background fluorescence of the test strip, dramatically improving sensitivity.”

The researchers have now moved on to trying to adjust the same technology to develop a rapid testing for other diseases, including Covid-19. If they can create a hand-held testing device allowing the technique to work even in poorly resourced locations, the innovation will be ready to scale.