Cutting-edge technology has captured remarkable images of Charlotte as an embryo but what's even more extraordinary is how this technology helped bring her to life. Charlotte, now nine weeks old, is one of the first babies in Australia to be born with the help of artificial intelligence. Of all the things her parents, Sarah-Eve Dumais Pelletier, 32, and Tim Keys, 33, thought would improve their chances of having a child of their own, a computer was not one of them. Yet, here their daughter is after they endured a painful 12 months of fertility struggles, two miscarriages and a failed round of IVF. The husband and wife, who live on the Sunshine Coast, are among 1000 patients taking part in an Australian-first trial using artificial intelligence in the embryo selection process during an IVF cycle.

Embryologists manually assess each embryo based on its physical appearance at a limited number of critical development check points, using a standard grading system together with digital time-lapse imagery to select the best embryo to transfer to the woman. Ivy AI observes the embryo's development while the embryo remains completely undisturbed in the time-lapse incubator. Ivy looks at the first five days of the embryo's life, and does this for 2000 embryos. Ivy takes millions of pieces of information and correlates this data, which then will tell the embryologist which embryo will have a successful fetal heart and accelerate the chance of a healthy baby. Pre-clinical validation of the technology has been conducted in Virtus Health clinics using the data obtained from more than 2600 embryos from NSW, the ACT and Queensland laboratories.