Olive Fertility Centre is the first fertility clinic in Western Canada to offer Violet™, a ground-breaking technology that leverages artificial-intelligence (AI) technology to better predict the success of outcomes for patients undergoing elective egg freezing.
Egg freezing provides an opportunity for women to defer childbearing while preserving their chances for a successful pregnancy which otherwise inevitably decline with age. The number of patients seeking elective egg freezing at Olive in 2020 increased by 30% compared to pre-pandemic levels. Ultimately, the goal of egg freezing is to result in the birth of a healthy child, an outcome that previously could only be estimated by age and the number of frozen eggs. Individualized predictions were not possible until now.
Violet is the product of the Canadian start-up, Future Fertility. Violet’s algorithm is based on hundreds of thousands of images in the training dataset. Each egg is analyzed independently, and a probability distribution is generated to predict chances of development into a healthy embryo and result in live birth. Violet provides a more granular, evidence-based probability of success for each patient, and in fact for each egg.
“Violet offers a more personalized knowledgebase than we have ever had before,” says Dr. Nakhuda, a co-founder and co-director at Olive Fertility Centre. “Instead of playing the odds just based on age and egg number, every patient, every cycle, and every egg can be considered independently.”
Violet is promising to be a game changer with studies demonstrating greater accuracy for prediction of outcomes when compared to predictions made by trained embryologists. While numerous other factors influence the outcome of a pregnancy, data provided by Violet enables patients to make more informed decisions about how to proceed with their fertility preservation plans.
“With Violet we finally have a solution to help women find out about the quality of their eggs, something that has not been possible so far,” says Future Fertility CEO, Diana Olusanmi. The decline in egg quality is one of the major reasons that conception becomes more difficult with age, and also why the risks of pregnancy losses and the chances of pregnancies affected by chromosomal disorders increase. Unfortunately, poor egg quality can also be a significant factor in young patients who are struggling with infertility.
“We are always looking to embrace technologies that add value for our patients,” says Dr. Nakhuda. “Violet is the first of the many AI tools that will inevitably shift the paradigm and change how we practice medicine and provide care and outcomes.”
