Simple bioelectrical microsensor: oocyte quality prediction via membrane electrophysiological characterization.

Oocyte selection is a crucial step of assisted reproductive treatment. The most common approach relies on the embryologist experience which is inevitably prone to human error. One potential approach could be the use of an electrical-based approach as an ameliorative alternative. Here, we developed a simple electrical microsensor to characterize mouse oocytes. The sensor is designed similarly to embryo culture dishes and is familiar to embryologists. Different microelectrode models were simulated for oocyte cells and a more sensitive model was determined. The final microsensor was fabricated. A differential measuring technique was proposed based on the cell presence/absence. We predicted oocyte quality by using three electrical characteristics, oocyte radii, and zona thicknesses, and also these predictions were compared with an embryologist evaluation. The evaluation of the oocyte membrane capacitance, as an electrophysiological characteristic, was found to be a more reliable method for predicting oocytes with fertilization and blastocyst formation success competence. It achieved 94% and 58% prediction accuracies, respectively, surpassing other methods and yielding lower errors. This groundbreaking research represents the first of its kind in this field and we hope that this will be a step towards improving the accuracy of the treatment.

Oocyte quality evaluation: a review of engineering approaches toward clinical challenges.

Although assisted reproductive technology has been very successful for the treatment of infertility, its steps are still dependent on direct human opinion. An important step of assisted reproductive treatments in lab for women is choosing an oocyte that has a better quality. This step would predict which oocyte has developmental competence leading to healthy baby. Observation of the oocyte morphological quality indicators under microscope by an embryologist is the most common evaluation method of oocyte quality. Such subjective method which relies on embryologist's experience may vary and leads to misdiagnosis. An alternative solution to eliminate human misjudging in traditional methods and overcome the limitations of them is always using engineering-based procedure. In this review article, we deeply study and categorize engineering-based methods applied for the evaluation of oocyte quality. Then, the challenges in laboratories and clinics settings move forward with translational medicine perspective in mind for all those methods which had been studied were discussed. Finally, a standardized process was presented, which may help improving and focusing the research in this field. Moreover, effective suggestion techniques were introduced that are expected they would be complementary methods to accelerate future researches. The aim of this review was to create a new prospect with the engineering approaches to evaluate oocyte quality and we hope this would help infertile couples to get a baby.