Applying data mining techniques for increasing implantation rate by selecting best sperms for intra-cytoplasmic sperm injection treatment.

BACKGROUND AND OBJECTIVE: Aspiration of a good-quality sperm during intracytoplasmic sperm injection (ICSI) is one of the main concerns. Understanding the influence of individual sperm morphology on fertilization, embryo quality, and pregnancy probability is one of the most important subjects in male factor infertility. Embryologists need to decide the best sperm for injection in real time during ICSI cycle. Our objective is to predict the quality of zygote, embryo, and implantation outcome before injection of each sperm in an ICSI cycle for male factor infertility with the aim of providing a decision support system on the sperm selection.

METHODS: The information was collected from 219 patients with male factor infertility at the infertility therapy center of Alzahra hospital in Rasht from 2012 through 2014. The prepared dataset included the quality of zygote, embryo, and implantation outcome of 1544 injected sperms into the related oocytes. In our study, embryo transfer was performed at day 3. Each sperm was represented with thirteen clinical features. Data preprocessing was the first step in the proposed data mining algorithm. After applying more than 30 classifiers, 9 successful classifiers were selected and evaluated by 10-fold cross validation technique using precision, recall, F1, and AUC measures. Another important experiment was measuring the effect of each feature in prediction process.

RESULTS: In zygote and embryo quality prediction, IBK and RandomCommittee models provided 79.2% and 83.8% F1, respectively. In implantation outcome prediction, KStar model achieved 95.9% F1, which is even better than prediction of human experts. All these predictions can be done in real time.

CONCLUSIONS: A machine learning-based decision support system would be helpful in sperm selection phase of ICSI cycle to improve the success rate of ICSI treatment.