AI helps infertile couple conceive after 19 years with two sperm cells

Artificial Intelligence is slowly changing the landscape of healthcare. Columbia University researchers developed an AI-powered system that can find even the rarest sperm cells in men who were previously thought to have none.
The new technology, called Sperm Tracking and Recovery (STAR), has already helped achieve its first confirmed pregnancy, marking a major step forward in treating severe cases of male infertility.
The couple, a 39-year-old man and a 37-year-old woman in the US, had undergone multiple in vitro fertilisation (IVF) cycles — procedures that involved manual search for sperm along with two surgical procedures to extract sperm.
The AI algorithm scanned 25 lakh images of the man’s semen sample for over two hours to identify two viable sperm cells, enabling the couple to conceive after 19 years. “A semen sample can appear totally normal, but when you look under the microscope you discover just a sea of cellular debris, with no sperm visible,” senior author Zev Williams, director of the Columbia University Fertility Center, said. The study was published in The Lancet.
Male infertility is responsible for up to 40% of all infertility cases. In some men, a condition called azoospermia means there are no sperm in their semen.
Others have cryptozoospermia, where sperm are so rare that even experienced embryologists may not find them after hours of searching under a microscope.
These men often go through painful and expensive treatments like testicular surgeries or repeated failed lab attempts only to be told to use donor sperm or consider adoption. The STAR system is an AI-guided, non-invasive device that can scan semen samples at an incredibly high speed, processing over a million microscopic images every hour.
As the sample flows through a specially designed chip, the AI scans it in real time, detecting and tracking potential sperm cells. When it spots one, it automatically separates that sperm safely into a small compartment, ready for use in fertility treatments such as intracytoplasmic sperm injection (ICSI) — where a single sperm is injected directly into an egg.