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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