If you’re a guy who’s been told you have zero sperm, no biological kids for you, there’s now a small sliver of hope for you yet in the form of a new AI system that’s finding sperm cells that doctors literally couldn’t see before.
The tech, called STAR, or Sperm Track and Recovery, comes out of Columbia University, where researchers basically borrowed a cue from astronomy, hence the name. The same kind of machine learning used to spot stars in a noisy night sky is now scanning semen samples for microscopic one-in-a-million sperm cells hiding in what looks like biological noise.
The BBC recently covered the incredible new tech, telling the tale of a pseudonym’d couple — “Penelope” and “Samuel.” Samuel has Klinefelter syndrome, a genetic condition that results in azoospermia, which is when there is no measurable sperm in semen. As you can imagine, that diagnosis usually slams the door shut on the prospect of having kids. But after surgery, hormone treatment, and a sample that was run through STAR, doctors found eight sperm.
Yes, only eight sperm, but if you know anything about the baby-making process, one good one is all you need. And one of those eight did the trick. Penelope was able to get pregnant.
The New Tech Finds Sperm 30% of the Time (Which Is a Lot)
It’s a pretty big deal considering that infertility affects about one in six people globally, and the variety of influences that determine male fertility were involved in up to half of those cases. Azoospermia alone affects around 1 percent of men. That’s potentially millions of men around the world who have previously been told they could not have kids who now have a small ray of hope
Of course, STAR is the reason this is even possible, and how it makes it possible is impressive and ingenious. Rather than a human technician squinting into a microscope to find individual sperm cells, the system scans hundreds of images per second and then identifies and extracts a sperm in milliseconds.
It’s still early on in its development, yet it’s already finding sperm in nearly 30 percent of cases where men had been told that things were hopeless. Thirty percent may not sound like much, but according to the BBC, that 30 percent is a huge improvement over previous manual methods of detection.
While STAR does offer a sliver of hope, keep in mind that just because they find a few viable sperm where there was previously thought to be none, it still doesn’t mean that any of those will lead to pregnancy. Add to that the fact that, thus far, the incorporation of artificial intelligence into medicine has been hit or miss. Results may vary, especially as the tech is still early in its implementation. But for people who were told their sperm cells were gone, there is now a small ray of hope.
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