Development of a novel Computer Assisted system for human Sperm Head Morphometry based on open source software

Abstract

Computer assisted sperm head morphology systems have been commercially available since the mid-1980s. The goal of these systems has been to obtain objective data on sperm head that can be used in research, human fertility clinics, and animal breeding programs. Widely used commercial systems include the Hamilton-Thorne, Bioscience, Beverly, Massachusetts, The commercial systems differ in their grayscale bitdepth, search region for finding the sperm in the image, grayscale thresholding method, image segmentation method to determine the pixel coordinates of the sperm head, A large amount of information necessary to reproduce data obtained with commercial systems is proprietary information not easily available, eventually limits the ability to conduct comparative evaluation and also its elevated cost has slowed down widespread adoption. In the present study, we have developed a plugin for sperm head morphology using open source software. Described the systems functionality and confirmed its validity with respect to the commercial softwares.