Skip to content
Artificial Intelligence Finds Rare Sperm For IVF episode artwork

Nov 11, 2025 1 min

Artificial Intelligence Finds Rare Sperm For IVF

from Dr. Howard Smith Reports Hosted by Howard G. Smith MD, AM

Vidcast: https://www.instagram.com/p/DQ7h-llESdf/ Men with low sperm counts, so-called azoospermia, have problems fathering children. To correct that problem, researchers at New York’s Columbia University Fertility Center have developed a system to ferret out, capture, and aggregate the rare sperm in a man’s semen sample in order to successfully fertilize an egg. Their procedure, dubbed STAR, short for Sperm Tracking and Recovery, uses high-powered imaging to take more than 8 million pictures of a semen sample in under an hour. Artificial intelligence then pinpoints rare sperm cells, and a robotic system gently isolates them for use in in-vitro fertilization. The Columbia team has just reported in The Lancet journal the successful use of STAR to help a couple that tried to conceive for 18 years plus. The system was able to identify just TWO two viable sperm cells in a 3.5 milliliter sample. Those were enough to create two embryos and to initiate a pregnancy. Fifteen percent of couples unable to get pregnant due to male infertility issues have male partners with so-called azoospermia. STAR could be a game charger for them once larger clinical studies are complete. https://medicalxpress.com/news/2025-10-couple-ai-sperm-recovery-method.html https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736(25)01623-X/fulltext #infertility #azoospermia #ivf #star #ai

Episode details come from the podcast's RSS feed.

Embed this episode

Ready to play

Artificial Intelligence Finds Rare Sperm For IVF

0:00 1:40

No transcript yet.

Requests help us decide what to transcribe next.

Frequently asked questions

How long is this episode of Dr. Howard Smith Reports?

This episode is 1 minute long.

When was this Dr. Howard Smith Reports episode published?

This episode was published on November 11, 2025.

Can I download this Dr. Howard Smith Reports episode?

Yes. Use the download control on the episode player to save the publisher-provided media file.