AI Fertility Breakthrough: New STAR Method Enables Sperm Detection for Azoospermia, Leading to Pregnancy After 18 Years

Jul 4
2 min read

Updated: Jul 12

A couple holds hands happily in a doctor's office, who shows positive results on their tablet. The scene captures the joy of a successful in vitro fertilization treatment.

After nearly two decades of trying to conceive, an anonymous couple is now expecting their first child, thanks to a revolutionary new AI Fertility Breakthrough. The couple had undergone multiple rounds of in vitro fertilization, or IVF, worldwide, but faced repeated disappointment due to azoospermia, a rare condition where no measurable sperm are present in the male partner’s semen. Men with this condition have such low sperm counts that even after hours of meticulous searching under a microscope, no sperm cells can be found.

However, their luck changed at the Columbia University Fertility Center with a novel approach called the STAR Method, which stands for Sperm Tracking and Recovery. Dr. Zev Williams, the center's director, and his team spent five years developing this AI-powered system. The STAR system connects to a microscope via a high-speed camera and imaging technology, scanning semen samples for sperm cells. It takes over 8 million images in under an hour to find what it's trained to identify as sperm.

In a remarkable demonstration of its capabilities, while highly skilled technicians searched a sample for two days and found nothing, the AI-based STAR System found 44 sperm in just one hour. For this particular couple, the system identified three hidden sperm, which were then used to fertilize the wife's eggs via IVF, leading to the first successful pregnancy enabled by the STAR method. The baby is due in December.

This is a game-changer for individuals facing severe male infertility. Traditionally, options for azoospermia included painful and invasive surgeries to retrieve sperm directly from the testes, or using donor sperm. The STAR method offers a new, less invasive alternative for finding viable sperm from semen samples, costing just under $3,000 to find, isolate, and freeze sperm for a patient.

While other AI tools are already assessing egg quality and screening healthy embryos for IVF, the STAR method brings new hope specifically to Sperm Detection in cases previously considered hopeless. Dr. Zev Williams describes it like "searching for a needle scattered across a thousand haystacks," but doing it gently and quickly.

However, some medical experts, like Dr. Gianpiero Palermo, who pioneered the method of injecting sperm directly into an egg, express skepticism. He believes more validation is needed and that the approach might offer false hope, as some men truly may have no spermatozoa, regardless of screening method. Despite this, Dr. Williams asserts that if sperm are present, this method can find them, offering a more realistic path forward before invasive procedures.

The developers plan to publish their work and share it with other fertility centers, with hopes to adapt the technology for other forms of infertility in the future. This marks a significant step in using advanced technology to solve an ancient human problem: infertility