Deep Learning-Based Morphological Classification of Human Sperm Heads

Abstract

Human infertility is considered as a serious disease of the reproductive system that affects more than 10% of couples across the globe and over 30% of the reported cases are related to men. The crucial step in the assessment of male infertility and subfertility is semen analysis that strongly depends on the sperm head morphology, i.e., the shape and size of the head of a spermatozoon. However, in medical diagnosis, the morphology of the sperm head is determined manually, and heavily depends on the expertise of the clinician. Moreover, this assessment as well as the morphological classification of human sperm heads are laborious and non-repeatable, and there is also a high degree of inter and intra-laboratory variability in the results. In order to overcome these problems, we propose a specialized convolutional neural network (CNN) architecture to accurately classify human sperm heads based on sperm images. It is carefully designed with several layers, and multiple filter sizes, but fewer filters and parameters to improve efficiency and effectiveness. It is demonstrated that our proposed architecture outperforms state-of-the-art methods, exhibiting 88% recall on the SCIAN dataset in the total agreement setting and 95% recall on the HuSHeM dataset for the classification of human sperm heads. Our proposed method shows the potential of deep learning to surpass embryologists in terms of reliability, throughput, and accuracy.