Dr. Howard Smith Oncall

Vidcast:  https://www.instagram.com/p/DQ7h-llESdf/Men with low sperm counts, so-called azoospermia, have problems fathering children.  To correct that problem, researchers at New York’s Columbia University Fertility Center have developed a system to ferret out, capture, and aggregate the rare sperm in a man’s semen sample in order to successfully fertilize an egg.Their procedure, dubbed STAR, short for Sperm Tracking and Recovery, uses high-powered imaging to take more than 8 million pictures of a semen sample in under an hour. Artificial intelligence then pinpoints rare sperm cells, and a robotic system gently isolates them for use in in-vitro fertilization.The Columbia team has just reported in The Lancet journal the successful use of STAR to help a couple that tried to conceive for 18 years plus. The system was able to identify just TWO two viable sperm cells in a 3.5 milliliter sample.  Those were enough to create two embryos and to initiate a pregnancy.Fifteen percent of couples unable to get pregnant du