Because of AI, a baby girl was born to a couple who had been told there was no sperm to work with.

Columbia's STAR system scanned 2.5 million images of a 3.5 mL sample in about two hours and found viable sperm where manual microscopy found none; the resulting pregnancy was confirmed in 2025, published in The Lancet in October 2025, and a healthy daughter was born in late 2025.

One case; STAR finds sperm in just under 30% of men diagnosed with azoospermia, and larger trials are still underway.

Compared with

Manual microscopy by trained technicians on the same sample (found none) vs STAR

Effect

~40x more sperm recovered than manual search across cases reported by the team (1 live birth; sperm found in ~30% of azoospermia patients tested)

Reach

Columbia University Fertility Center only

Domain

Medicine · Classic ML

Conflicts

Two authors are inventors on Columbia patent applications for STAR.

What would move the grade

A multi-center series with live-birth rates would move evidence to B or C.

Sources

• primaryColumbia / The Lancet: First clinical pregnancy following AI-based microfluidic sperm detection (press release) (eurekalert.org)
• secondaryNational Geographic: The first AI-assisted IVF babies are now being born (nationalgeographic.com)
• secondaryDecrypt/BBC: Doctors use AI to spot hidden sperm (birth confirmed) (decrypt.co)

Editor's notes

verify: reports differ on which couple was the first (a 19-year infertility case in the Lancet letter vs a Klinefelter case in BBC coverage); confirm birth month.

History

• Oct 22, 2026Added.

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