IVF 2.0 Limited, Merseyside, UK.
New Hope Fertility Center, Mexico City, Mexico.
Sci Rep. 2023 Jan 2;13(1):15. doi: 10.1038/s41598-022-26386-6.
The selection of the best single blastocyst for transfer is typically based on the assessment of the morphological characteristics of the zona pellucida (ZP), trophectoderm (TE), blastocoel (BC), and inner cell-mass (ICM), using subjective and observer-dependent grading protocols. We propose the first automatic method for segmenting all morphological structures during the different developmental stages of the blastocyst (i.e., expansion, hatching, and hatched). Our database contains 592 original raw images that were augmented to 2132 for training and 55 for validation. The mean Dice similarity coefficient (DSC) was 0.87 for all pixels, and for the BC, BG (background), ICM, TE, and ZP was 0.85, 0.96, 0.54, 0.63, and 0.71, respectively. Additionally, we tested our method against a public repository of 249 images resulting in accuracies of 0.96 and 0.93 and DSC of 0.67 and 0.67 for ICM and TE, respectively. A sensitivity analysis demonstrated that our method is robust, especially for the BC, BG, TE, and ZP. It is concluded that our approach can automatically segment blastocysts from different laboratory settings and developmental phases of the blastocysts, all within a single pipeline. This approach could increase the knowledge base for embryo selection.
通常，选择最佳的单个囊胚进行移植是基于对透明带（ZP）、滋养层（TE）、囊胚腔（BC）和内细胞团（ICM）的形态特征进行评估，使用主观和依赖观察者的分级方案。我们提出了第一个自动分割囊胚在不同发育阶段（即扩张、孵化和孵化）的所有形态结构的方法。我们的数据库包含 592 张原始原始图像，经过扩充，用于训练的图像增加到 2132 张，用于验证的图像增加到 55 张。所有像素的平均 Dice 相似系数（DSC）为 0.87，BC、BG（背景）、ICM、TE 和 ZP 的 DSC 分别为 0.85、0.96、0.54、0.63 和 0.71。此外，我们还将我们的方法与 249 张图像的公共存储库进行了测试，结果显示 ICM 和 TE 的准确率分别为 0.96 和 0.93，DSC 分别为 0.67 和 0.67。敏感性分析表明，我们的方法是稳健的，特别是对于 BC、BG、TE 和 ZP。结论是，我们的方法可以自动分割来自不同实验室环境和囊胚发育阶段的囊胚，所有这些都在单个管道中完成。这种方法可以增加胚胎选择的知识库。
