Feasibility of deep learning for predicting live birth from a blastocyst image in patients classified by age.

To identify artificial intelligence (AI) classifiers in images of blastocysts to predict the probability of achieving a live birth in patients classified by age. Results are compared to those obtained by conventional embryo (CE) evaluation. A total of 5691 blastocysts were retrospectively enrolled. Images captured 115 hours after insemination (or 139 hours if not yet large enough) were classified according to maternal age as follows: <35, 35-37, 38-39, 40-41, and ≥42 years. The classifiers for each category and a classifier for all ages were related to convolutional neural networks associated with deep learning. Then, the live birth functions predicted by the AI and the multivariate logistic model functions predicted by CE were tested. The feasibility of the AI was investigated. The accuracies of AI/CE for predicting live birth were 0.64/0.61, 0.71/0.70, 0.78/0.77, 0.81/0.83, 0.88/0.94, and 0.72/0.74 for the age categories <35, 35-37, 38-39, 40-41, and ≥42 years and all ages, respectively. The sum value of the sensitivity and specificity revealed that AI performed better than CE ( AI classifiers categorized by age can predict the probability of live birth from an image of the blastocyst and produced better results than were achieved using CE.

Déclaration de conflit d'intérêts

Conflict of interest: Yasunari Miyagi, Toshihiro Habara, Rei Hirata, and Nobuyoshi Hayashi declare that they have no conflicts of interest. Human rights statements and informed consent: Human rights statements and informed consent: All procedures followed were performed in accordance with the ethical standards of the responsible committee on human experimentation (institutional and national) and with the Helsinki Declaration of 1964 and its later amendments. Informed consent was obtained from all patients for inclusion in the study. Additional informed consent was obtained from all patients for which identifying information is included in this article. A Web site with additional information, including an “opt‐out” option, was set up for the study. Animal studies: No animals were used in this study. Approval by ethics committee: The protocol for the research project including human participants was approved by the Institutional Review Board at Okayama Couples’ Clinic (IRB no. 18000128‐05).