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.