About us & our product
ImVitro’s SaaS platform EMBRYOLY is an AI-powered software. EMBRYOLY’s core feature provides a ranking based on the embryo’s morphokinetics as well as a subsequent transfer priority recommendation personalized to the patient for increased accuracy. See our product page for more information!
The challenge
Patients often go through several failed transfers before getting pregnant, presumably because the embryo with the highest potential was not transferred first. This not only prevents the IVF center from welcoming new patients, but also decreases the clinic’s first cycle pregnancy rate and increases the likelihood of patients giving up before getting pregnant.
Identifying the embryo with the highest pregnancy potential is time-consuming and difficult, especially for less experienced embryologists. The criteria for identifying the most promising embryo is often reduced to focusing on blastocyst quality for lack of time and the difficulty of figuring out the right combination of kinetic events predictive of pregnancy. IVF centers need a second pair of eyes to have this subtle and complex morphokinetic ranking made easier, to save analysis time and minimize patients’ time to pregnancy (TTP). Ultimately, this helps to welcome more patients as well as control and increase the clinic’s success rates.
Questions to answer
- How often are the embryos transferred first by embryologists amongst those most highly prioritized by EMBRYOLY?
- How consistent is this agreement from one IVF center to another?
What would have been the impact on the TTP if the embryologist had transferred EMBRYOLY’s highest-ranked embryo first?
The study at a glance
88%
of embryos transferred first by embryologists were also assigned to the highest transfer priority by EMBRYOLY
8.4%
standard deviation on the highest-ranked embryo across clinics that perform day 5 (D5) embryo transfer
-0.45
cycles to pregnancy if the embryologist had transferred EMBRYOLY’s highest-ranked embryo first
Dataset
Data from N=726 patients was acquired through a MIRI® (ESCO), GERI® (Genea BiomedX), EMBRYOSCOPE® and EMBRYOSCOPE PLUS® (Vitrolife) time-lapse systems and uploaded on EMBRYOLY from a group of 4 INOVIE Fertilité clinics in France, during its initial lab integration between 2022 and 2023. In this period, the scores from EMBRYOLY were not necessarily taken into consideration for the final transfer decision. The data collected was not used in the algorithm’s training described in Human Reproduction¹.
Findings
Analyzing the data uploaded through EMBRYOLY across INOVIE’s clinics showed its ability to rank embryos: an increase of +0.01 in our AI-powered score was statistically associated with +2% to +5% relative pregnancy likelihood (p<0.01). The data yielded the following insights:
There is a high degree of agreement on the highest-ranked embryo between doctors and EMBRYOLY in clinics that performed D5 transfers (67% of transfers, N = 187 embryos).
88% of embryos transferred first by the embryologist were also assigned as a top transfer priority by EMBRYOLY in clinics that performed D5 transfers (N = 187 embryos).
Overall, the agreement between doctors and EMBRYOLY on the highest-ranked embryo had low variability across clinics that perform D5 transfers, demonstrating EMBRYOLY’s ability to generalize to a variety of patient and embryo populations.
Looking only at patients who got pregnant following multiple cycles, EMBRYOLY could have reduced the TTP by 0.45 (±0.69 [0.00,2.00]) cycles if the embryologist had transferred EMBRYOLY’s highest-ranked embryo first.
More specifically, in 66% of first cycle pregnancies (N = 79) EMBRYOLY had also ranked the transferred embryo highest. When the first embryo transferred did not lead to a pregnancy, EMBRYOLY agreed with 69% of the highest-ranked embryos (N = 75). However, this could very well be because none of the other embryos available in this cohort might have led to pregnancy either, had they also been transferred.
Which one would you have transferred first?
Below are videos of three embryos from the same cohort transferred at D5. Which one would you have transferred first?
Keep reading to find out the answer! If you want to test out your embryo-ranking skills further, click here.
Conclusion at a glance
Identifying the best embryo to be transferred is a crucial task, but it can be time-consuming and complex depending on the embryologist’s experience or their daily workload.
This case study shows that EMBRYOLY often agreed with the embryo that embryologists ranked highest but could have also helped them reduce the TTP by 3.7 months by helping them identify faster the embryo that would have led to a pregnancy.
EMBRYOLY can be used as a powerful second pair of eyes to free up valuable time and bandwidth for embryologists while ensuring top performances.
Answer to "which one would you have transferred first?"
Embryo A (scored 0.63) was transferred first but did not lead to a pregnancy. EMBRYOLY ranked Embryo B (scored 0.67) first, which was transferred last and led to a clinical pregnancy.