The likelihood that a human embryo cultured during in vitro fertilization (IVF) will develop successfully to the five-day mark can be predicted with about 93% sensitivity and specificity from three early developmental events.
In IVF, 50–70% of embryos never make it to the blastocyst stage, which begins five or six days after fertilization. Renee Reijo Pera at Stanford University in California and her group analysed images of 242 IVF embryos (pictured) taken with microscopic time-lapse photography. They found that those that would go on to form blastocysts showed specific developmental patterns, such as the first cytokinesis — cleavage that results in two separate cells — lasting less than 33 minutes. The team devised an algorithm to automatically screen embryos for this and two other parameters, and found that it could predict which embryos would reach the blastocyst stage.
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Biotechnology: Pictures predict embryos' fate. Nature 467, 636 (2010). https://doi.org/10.1038/467636a
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/467636a
