Assisting the Human Embryo Viability Assessment by Deep Learning for In Vitro Fertilization

Abstract

The increasing global infertility rate is a matter of significant concern. In vitro fertilization (IVF) significantly minimizes infertility by providing an alternative clinical means of becoming pregnant. The success of IVF mainly depends on the assessment and analysis of human blastocyst components such as the blastocoel (BC), zona pellucida (ZP), inner cell mass (ICM), and trophectoderm (TE). Embryologists perform a morphological assessment of the blastocyst components for the selection of potential embryos to be used in the IVF process. Manual assessment of blastocyst components is time-consuming, subjective, and prone to errors. Therefore, artificial intelligence (AI)-based methods are highly desirable for enhancing the success rate and efficiency of IVF. In this study, a novel feature-supplementation-based blastocyst segmentation network (FSBS-Net) has been developed to deliver higher segmentation accuracy for blastocyst components with less computational overhead compared with state-of-the-art methods. FSBS-Net uses an effective feature supplementation mechanism along with ascending channel convolutional blocks to accurately detect the pixels of the blastocyst components with minimal spatial loss. The proposed method was evaluated using an open database for human blastocyst component segmentation, and it outperformed state-of-the-art methods in terms of both segmentation accuracy and computational efficiency. FSBS-Net segmented the BC, ZP, ICM, TE, and background with intersections over union (IoU) values of 89.15, 85.80, 85.55, 80.17, and 95.61%, respectively. In addition, FSBS-Net achieved a mean IoU for all categories of 87.26% with only 2.01 million trainable parameters. The experimental results demonstrate that the proposed method could be very helpful in assisting embryologists in the morphological assessment of human blastocyst components.