UNSW student designs system to improve IVF success rates

A final year medicine student at the University of New South Wales (UNSW) has designed an artificial intelligence (AI) system that's helping women become pregnant using IVF techniques. UNSW said on Wednesday that Aengus Tran, 24, and his MBA- accredited brother Dimitry have founded Harrrison-AI, an organisation that uses machine learning technology to improve the embryo selection process. The men were driven to start the company following a lecture from IVF Australia's scientific director, Dr Simon Cooke, who said that embryologists manually assess groups of embryos based on physical appearance at a limited number of critical development checkpoints. This is before they select the embryo they feel is most likely to result in a pregnancy, UNSW said. Tran has created a system called'Ivy' that uses machine learning from thousands of previous successful and unsuccessful embryos to help make decisions about viability faster and better.