{"title":"High-Throughput and Stain-Free Morphological Analysis of Sperm Using Optofluidic Time-Stretch Imaging Flow Cytometry","authors":"Yueyun Weng, Yujie Zou, Yan Jin, Shubin Wei, Feng Zhang, Rubing Li, Liye Mei, Dongyong Yang, Zhimin Deng, Rui Qu, Dongdong Tang, Du Wang, Fuling Zhou, Sheng Liu, Tailang Yin, Cheng Lei","doi":"10.1002/jbio.202400560","DOIUrl":null,"url":null,"abstract":"<div>\n \n <p>The incidence of male infertility has kept increasing year by year, severely affecting the sustainability of society. Sperm morphological analysis plays an important role in assessing sperm fertility. However, current sperm morphological analysis is usually performed using microscopic images of stained sperm, which requires complex staining operations, making it difficult to achieve a comprehensive and efficient diagnosis. In this work, we propose and experimentally demonstrate sperm morphological analysis with optofluidic time-stretch (OTS) imaging flow cytometry. Specifically, we capture the stain-free sperm images with high-throughput OTS imaging flow cytometry and analyze the morphological features using a U-Net network. The analysis of 40,000 images from 20 clinical semen samples indicates that our method achieves higher accuracy than the smear test and shows high concordance with the results using comprehensive methods of routine semen examination. This work provides a high-throughput, stain-free sperm morphological analysis method, which holds promise for a comprehensive evaluation of semen.</p>\n </div>","PeriodicalId":184,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Biophotonics","volume":"18 5","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":2.0000,"publicationDate":"2025-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":"0","resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":null,"PeriodicalName":"Journal of Biophotonics","FirstCategoryId":"101","ListUrlMain":"https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/jbio.202400560","RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"物理与天体物理","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":null,"EPubDate":"","PubModel":"","JCR":"Q3","JCRName":"BIOCHEMICAL RESEARCH METHODS","Score":null,"Total":0}
引用次数: 0
Abstract
The incidence of male infertility has kept increasing year by year, severely affecting the sustainability of society. Sperm morphological analysis plays an important role in assessing sperm fertility. However, current sperm morphological analysis is usually performed using microscopic images of stained sperm, which requires complex staining operations, making it difficult to achieve a comprehensive and efficient diagnosis. In this work, we propose and experimentally demonstrate sperm morphological analysis with optofluidic time-stretch (OTS) imaging flow cytometry. Specifically, we capture the stain-free sperm images with high-throughput OTS imaging flow cytometry and analyze the morphological features using a U-Net network. The analysis of 40,000 images from 20 clinical semen samples indicates that our method achieves higher accuracy than the smear test and shows high concordance with the results using comprehensive methods of routine semen examination. This work provides a high-throughput, stain-free sperm morphological analysis method, which holds promise for a comprehensive evaluation of semen.
期刊介绍:
The first international journal dedicated to publishing reviews and original articles from this exciting field, the Journal of Biophotonics covers the broad range of research on interactions between light and biological material. The journal offers a platform where the physicist communicates with the biologist and where the clinical practitioner learns about the latest tools for the diagnosis of diseases. As such, the journal is highly interdisciplinary, publishing cutting edge research in the fields of life sciences, medicine, physics, chemistry, and engineering. The coverage extends from fundamental research to specific developments, while also including the latest applications.