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| courtesy:Harvard.edu |
Nearly 12%
of world’s male population suffer from infertility but, it is often not diagnosed
because of various stigmas associated with it. Men in our society are often
reluctant to get the needed pathological tests, especially the semen analysis.
Researchers
at Brigham and Women’s Hospital and Massachusetts General Hospital(MGH) have
developed a home based test that can be performed in privacy of your home, in
remote or low resource areas using an inexpensive device that attaches to the
smartphone.
The team has
shown that the device can analyze an unwashed, unprocessed liquefied semen
sample in <5-s mean processing time with ~98% accuracy based on the World
Health Organization (WHO) guidelines. The study was published online in today’s
Science Translational Medicine.
Current semen
analyzing methods are lab based, require sophisticated instruments and are
labor intensive requiring highly trained technicians to produce reliable
results. These can be computer-assisted semen analysis (CASA) or Manual
microscope-based testing.
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| courtesy:harvard.edu |
The smartphone based
platform consists of a hardware component and a software component.The
hardware part of the analyzer consists of an optical attachment with a disposable microchip and polydimethylsiloxane (PDMS) bulb used to load the
sample by capillary action.
The software
application consists of user friendly interface that guide the user through
each step of the testing. The app analyzes, image and report the results at an
average time of 4.48 s. It uses the smartphone camera for imaging. The results
are stored in the app, so that the parameters can be compared over time.
The device was tested
by the team by analyzing 350 clinical semen specimens at the MGH Fertility
Center. The test could detect sperm concentration (<15 million sperm/ml) and
motility (<40%) among samples according to WHO guidelines with 97.71%
accuracy.
The developers also
tested the use of the platform by trained vs. untrained people and it performed
well in both the cases.
Apart from its use as
at-home male fertility testing, it could be used by males who have undergone
vasectomy to ensure the absence of sperm from the semen sample. It could also
be used in veterinary medicine for animal breeding.
The total cost to
fabricate the smartphone accessory and the disposable microfluidic device was only
$4.45 as compared to thousands of dollars for a typical CASA-based platform.
The device is currently
in a prototyping stage. The team plans to perform additional tests and will file
for FDA approval. The platform demonstrates that how software can be integrated
with hardware and microfluidics to develop a point of care device as a very
useful tool in male infertility.
A very similar YO sperm test system recently received FDA clearance and is already in market for
sale and use by consumers.
The full text of the article
in Science Translational
Medicine can be accessed here.
A
smartphone-based test for male fertility
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