'Digital Washing' of Semen Time-Lapse Images

  • Ludvik Alkhoury
  • , Atilla Sivri
  • , Ji Won Choi
  • , Justin Bopp
  • , Albert Anouna
  • , Andreas W. Henkel
  • , Matthew Vermilyea
  • , Moshe Kam

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceedingConference contribution

Abstract

We introduce a supervised learning method for sperm cell detection in time-lapse images collected from raw human semen samples. This method uses a set of geometric features extracted from moving sperm cells (class SM) to identify immotile sperm cells (class SD) which typically share the same geometric features of moving sperm cells. It thus separates immotile sperm cells from other types of non-sperm cells (class O) and debris. We refer to this selective identification and separation process as 'Digital Washing'. It was tested on images collected from fourteen male volunteers. We compare the performance of the proposed method to that of two alternative methods, namely, the detection method of Urbano and his co-workers (2017) and YOLOv5 VISEM-Tracking (2023). Comparison criteria included precision, recall, and Fβ-scores. The proposed method provided precision of 0.82 ± 0.15, recall of 0.92 ± 0.03, F0.5-score of 0.83 ± 0.13, F1-score of 0.86 ± 0.09, and F2-score of 0.89 ± 0.05.

Original languageEnglish (US)
Title of host publication35th IEEE International Workshop on Machine Learning for Signal Processing
Subtitle of host publicationSignal Processing in the Age of Lorge Language Models, MLSP 2025
PublisherIEEE Computer Society
ISBN (Electronic)9798331570293
DOIs
StatePublished - 2025
Event35th IEEE International Workshop on Machine Learning for Signal Processing, MLSP 2025 - Istanbul, Turkey
Duration: Aug 31 2025Sep 3 2025

Publication series

NameIEEE International Workshop on Machine Learning for Signal Processing, MLSP
ISSN (Print)2161-0363
ISSN (Electronic)2161-0371

Conference

Conference35th IEEE International Workshop on Machine Learning for Signal Processing, MLSP 2025
Country/TerritoryTurkey
CityIstanbul
Period8/31/259/3/25

All Science Journal Classification (ASJC) codes

  • Signal Processing
  • Human-Computer Interaction

Keywords

  • Computer-aided semen analysis
  • Digital Washing
  • Human sperm imaging
  • Machine learning in biomedical imaging
  • Motile and immotile cells
  • Sperm cell detection
  • Sperm cell geometric features
  • Supervised learning

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