Vitrolife: Customer Perspective & Custom Embryo Development Algorithms

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Since PGT-A testing, have there been any major scientific developments or improvements to the overall process, would you say?

There's an imaging process every few minutes, allowing us to examine them in great detail without disturbing their protected environment. This has accumulated data that we can mine, helping us understand not just embryo development better, but also which embryos and patterns of development are most associated with a healthy pregnancy. This has resulted in the development of selection algorithms and many research papers studying the nuances of embryo development, which can only be a good thing.

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How much of the positive results of time-lapse technology are attributable to the embryo staying undisturbed in the incubator versus the actual data part of it? Which one contributes more? How do you think about that?

We've built our own algorithms to predict birth outcomes because we were first movers in the UK and accumulated a lot of data. In the UK, we are obliged to collect birth outcome data, so our dataset is very complete. We've built and validated these algorithms properly with training and validation datasets and prospectively validated them. We know that it is identifying and ranking the best embryos for us better than we could otherwise.

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Are you using images from the EmbryoScope, or do you have a custom incubator or a competitor's device? How does that work? What's the source of the data, so to speak?

We've used the EmbryoScope for many years, and I'd say 90% of our time-lapse devices are EmbryoScope. We've acquired some clinics that have different systems, like the Geri time-lapse incubator. We try to apply our knowledge and learnings from the EmbryoScope to the images and systems from the Geri. It's a challenging exercise, but I believe the human embryo follows a predetermined pathway of development. It doesn't make biological sense that an algorithm built on one image system would be different from another. Technically, there are some challenges in translating, but overall, I think they should be completely compatible.

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