Artificial Intelligence won't improve poor IVF clinical practice

No doubt about it, AI will revolutionise the IVF industry.

AI is the buzzword right now so I'd like to offer my honest take on things – as it stands at the start of 2025. My thoughts may change as things evolve yet I felt it important to share. No doubt it's a topic I'll come back to in the future.

I'm excited about how AI is evolving. I'm mostly excited about what it means for the teams of embryologists out there.

Embryologists work under some of the most stressful conditions in any IVF clinic. Support via AI to help embryologists reduce repetitive tasks will reduce some of that stress. For example, we do a thing called "annotations" – this is where we watch embryo time lapse videos and mark how and when cell division takes place and mark developmental milestones. We do this every day with every embryo. At The Evewell, this could be up to two hundred embryos in a day!

That's just one example and there will be plenty more. It's the ability to improve the process for us embryologists that matters. This of course has a positive impact on the time available for patient care.

But AI cannot remove the human element of the IVF process, at least not yet.

A doctor still needs to create a good stimulation plan for those going through treatment.

Patients still need to do all their injections correctly.

Regular monitoring with scans and blood tests throughout the stimulation phase needs to happen to ensure good egg collection outcomes.

The eggs and sperm still need to be collected, processed, and handled by embryologists.

The embryos need to be physically created by a human process and then handled – by a human – during transfer and freezing processes.

How good a human is at their job will always matter. This sounds controversial yet this is the reality.

Here's another way of putting it. AI could visually assess an egg as amazing but if the freezing techniques are poor and the egg doesn’t survive, none of its AI deemed potential matters.

An embryo could look picture perfect and meet the best algorithmic AI score but it still has so be biopsied and frozen by a person.

All clinics using AI should still judge the decisions an AI makes. AI mistakes can be more erratic than human ones and mistakes in IVF can be catastrophic.

How a lab and a clinic performs is still the most important thing that determines successful outcomes. Artificial Intelligence won't improve poor IVF clinical practice.

So, am I excited about AI? Of course.

But is it all that matters right now?

Far from it.

I offer private patient embryology consultations. I can:

• Discuss the basics of fertility treatment and the many options available
• Review treatment plans and results prior to starting IVF treatment
• Review previous IVF cycle embryo timelapse videos
• Review pre-implantation embryo genetic testing (PGT) results
• Help explore options when there is genetic disease in the family
• Discuss and explore donor sperm options
• Plus more

Send me a message if you'd like to set up a 1 hour consultation.