Accurate machine learning model for human embryo morphokinetic stage detection

The ability to detect, monitor, and precisely time the morphokinetic stages of human pre-implantation embryo development plays a critical role in assessing their viability and potential for successful implantation. Therefore, there is a need for accurate and accessible tools to analyse embryos. This work describes a highly accurate, machine learning model designed to predict 17 morphokinetic stages of pre-implantation human development, an improvement on existing models. This model provides a robust tool for researchers and clinicians, enabling the automation of morphokinetic stage prediction, standardising the process, and reducing subjectivity between clinics.

A computer vision model was built on a publicly available dataset for embryo Morphokinetic stage detection. The dataset contained 273,438 labelled images based on Embryoscope/ + © embryo images. The dataset was split 70/10/20 into training/validation/test sets. Two different deep learning architectures were trained and tested, one using EfficientNet-V2-Large and the other using EfficientNet-V2-Large with the addition of fertilisation time as input. A new postprocessing algorithm was developed to reduce noise in the predictions of the deep learning model and detect the exact time of each morphokinetic stage change.

The proposed model reached an overall test F1-score of 0.881 and accuracy of 87% across 17 morphokinetic stages on an independent test set.

The proposed model shows a 17% accuracy improvement, compared to the best models on the same dataset. Therefore, our model can accurately detect morphokinetic stages in static embryo images as well as detecting the exact timings of stage changes in a complete time-lapse video.