Abstract
Machine learning is gaining popularity in the commercial world, but its benefits are yet to be well-utilised by many in the microfluidics community. There is immense potential in bridging the gap between applied engineering and artificial intelligence as well as statistics. We illustrate this by a case study investigating the sorting of sperm cells for assisted reproduction. Slender body theory (SBT) is applied to compute the behavior of sperm subjected to magnetophoresis, with due consideration given to statistical variations. By performing computations on a small subset of the generated data, we train an ensemble of four supervised learning algorithms and use it to make predictions on the velocity of each sperm. Our results suggest that magnetophoresis can magnify the difference between normal and abnormal cells, such that a sorted sample has over twice the proportion of desirable cells. In addition, we demonstrated that the predictions from machine learning gave comparable results with significantly lower computational costs.
Highlights
The World Health Organisation (2002) found that about one in ten couples worldwide experience difficulties conceiving
While desirable sperm cells can be manually selected for use in in-vitro fertilisation (IVF) or intracytoplasmic sperm injection (ICSI) [6], this is not feasible for intrauterine insemination (IUI) given the large number of sperm required
Despite evidence that sperm cells subjected to a magnetic field remain viable with the potential for fertilisation [16,18], there is more to be studied before such sorted spermatozoa may be used to increase the success rates of assisted reproduction for the public
Summary
The World Health Organisation (2002) found that about one in ten couples worldwide experience difficulties conceiving. Despite evidence that sperm cells subjected to a magnetic field remain viable with the potential for fertilisation [16,18], there is more to be studied before such sorted spermatozoa may be used to increase the success rates of assisted reproduction for the public. When O(C2X) O(C1), the magnetic force on the sperm head centre and β-th segment of the flagellum can further be simplified to Fh = 4πr3hC0/3, 0, 0 T and Fβ = π p2ΛC0/N, 0, 0 T respectively, where C0 = χp − χm C1C2/μ0.
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