Machine learning predicts live-birth occurrence before in-vitro fertilization treatment

Abstract

In-vitro fertilization (IVF) is a popular method of resolving complications such as endometriosis, poor egg quality, a genetic disease of mother or father, problems with ovulation, antibody problems that harm sperm or eggs, the inability of sperm to penetrate or survive in the cervical mucus and low sperm counts, resulting human infertility. Nevertheless, IVF does not guarantee success in the fertilization. Choosing IVF is burdensome for the reason of high cost and uncertainty in the result. As the complications and fertilization factors are numerous in the IVF process, it is a cumbersome task for fertility doctors to give an accurate prediction of a successful birth. Artificial Intelligence (AI) has been employed in this study for predicting the live-birth occurrence. This work mainly focuses on making predictions of live-birth occurrence when an embryo forms from a couple and not a donor. Here, we compare various AI algorithms, including both classical Machine Learning, deep learning architecture, and an ensemble of algorithms on the publicly available dataset provided by Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority (HFEA). Insights on data and metrics such as confusion matrices, F1-score, precision, recall, receiver operating characteristic (ROC) curves are demonstrated in the subsequent sections. The training process has two settings Without feature selection and With feature selection to train classifier models. Machine Learning, Deep learning, ensemble models classification paradigms have been trained in both settings. The Random Forest model achieves the highest F1-score of 76.49% in without feature selection setting. For the same model, the precision, recall, and area under the ROC Curve (ROC AUC) scores are 77%, 76%, and 84.60%, respectively. The success of the pregnancy depends on both male and female traits and living conditions. This study predicts a successful pregnancy through the clinically relevant parameters in In-vitro fertilization. Thus artificial intelligence plays a promising role in decision making process to support the diagnosis, prognosis, treatment etc.