How AI Will Change the Future of IVF

By making the embryo selection process more effective (and compassionate) for patients, artificial intelligence has the potential to exponentially increase success rates for fertility treatments

AI-assisted pregnancies are still in their infancy, but given the state of today’s culture wars and how politicized reproductive rights and gender identity have become (not to mention the debate over the potential harm of AI) there’s a real chance they could be outlawed.?

Elected officials and business leaders need to understand and harness the positive impact that AI will have on fertility medicine and, more broadly, on America’s long-term economic interests.?

AI as an IVF opportunity equalizer

IVF today remains expensive and inefficient. People who undergo fertility treatment typically find the process emotionally and physically challenging because the incredibly high-stakes outcome–getting and staying pregnant–remains frustratingly unpredictable and cost-prohibitive for many. I’ve personally witnessed the anxiety and heartbreak of friends and family going through the process of IVF.?

The odds of conceiving a child from a single IVF cycle–the cost of which is $15,000 on the conservative end–are less than one in three. As birth rates decline and more couples struggle to conceive, the need for affordable, reliable fertility care grows more urgent. This is where AI is poised to become a game-changer.

AI presents the possibility of bringing a data-based, computational approach to IVF. By making the process more effective, artificial intelligence can vastly improve the odds of conception, creating a blueprint for modern fertility care that is more affordable and compassionate to patients.?

Making IVF more data driven–and compassionate

One of the key pain points in IVF is selecting embryos that lead to viable pregnancies.?

Currently, the process of selecting an embryo varies drastically from one embryologist to the next. It’s so subjective that some scientists have likened it to judging contestants in a beauty pageant. According to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, there were more than 300,000 IVF cycles performed in the United States in 2020, resulting in only about 80,000 live births. Part of the problem is that embryologists lack critical data about embryos, pre-existing conditions and successful births, making it difficult to generalize which embryos have the highest odds of resulting in a healthy pregnancy. In fact, right now, IVF success rates for women under 35 is only 51% and that number decreases to 38% for women ages 35-37.?

By using deep learning and machine intelligence, AI can improve multiple steps in the IVF process, including selecting which eggs and sperm have the best odds of resulting in an embryo and which embryos, in turn, have the highest chance of surviving in the womb.?

Already, research involving AI in fertility care has improved the embryo selection process, which leads to more successful births. Recent experiments using AI systems to identify cow embryos most likely to survive were 76% accurate, capable of flagging issues in specimens that human evaluators couldn’t see.?

By reducing human-led subjectivity in embryo selection, AI can raise IVF success rates and help reduce the emotional and physical toll on patients, creating a level of accuracy-based compassion that human doctors alone cannot match.?

Reducing the emotional and mental stress of IVF

Some companies already support reproductive endocrinologists by providing recommendations, based on comparative embryo data, to select optimal medication doses, maximize the number of mature eggs retrieved from an ovarian stimulation cycle and avoid embryos that are not likely to survive in the womb.

In the future, AI’s role could broaden even further, assisting doctors in determining a couple’s infertility risk even before they plan to have a child. It’s also possible that AI could help provide algorithmically derived recommendations for when couples should begin fertility treatment based on factors like age, genetics and hormone levels.?

AI-assisted fertility processes will result in better care for more people; by automating parts of the fertility process, providers can cut costs, lowering the barrier to entry for people struggling to conceive.

AI can also mitigate the often enormous mental and emotional stress placed on prospective parents – a large part of which is often about that $15,000-per-cycle cost. By making IVF treatments less expensive and more likely to succeed, and by giving fertility providers vastly greater amounts of data to more accurately select embryos, AI can make fertility medicine more compassionate. Which inevitably reduces the amount of emotional and mental stress prospective parents endure.?

So, yes, along with its more obvious advantages, AI will also create a higher mental-health standard for fertility patients.?

The long-term economic advantage of AI-based fertility medicine?

For all its patient-centered advantages, AI-led IVF treatments could also become a strategically important economic lever for the United States and other countries with decreasing birth rates.???

For more than a decade, U.S. birth rates have been in dramatic decline, with the total fertility rate reaching its lowest point on record in 2020. A chronically declining birthrate means an older population with fewer available workers who produce fewer goods and services – the hallmarks of a national economic decline that would be a direct threat to America’s future.?

By providing more effective and affordable fertility treatment to American families, AI-enhanced fertility care could have a strategic role to play in avoiding a catastrophic decline in American birth rates and all the knock-on economic and national security implications.?

As with so many other areas of AI, if the U.S. doesn’t take the lead here, China surely will. China is, in fact, already using innovations in AI fertility to help solve some of its greatest demographic challenges. The cost of not embracing AI in IVF and fertility medicine may end up inhibiting America’s ability to remain an economic superpower.?

American leadership in AI-assisted fertility will have huge potential benefits for its citizens and its economy in the crucial years and decades ahead.