AI is everywhere: in our phones, in our offices, and more and more in fertility clinics. There is a lot of talk about what it could do. Our recent webinar asked a more useful question: what is AI actually doing in real clinical practice today?
If you missed it live, you can now watch the full recording on YouTube.
MedITEX Consultant Francesca Löschel hosted the session together with Dr. Helen Hunter, Lab Director and Person Responsible at Manchester Fertility, and FertilAI, our technology partner. Here is what to expect from the recording.
The starting point: a good problem to have
Manchester Fertility has been helping people build families for more than 40 years, with over 10,000 babies born in its care, and has worked with MedITEX for many years. As the clinic grew busier, egg collections started to bunch up on Mondays and Fridays. Because collections run Monday to Friday only, a heavy Monday turned Saturday into one of the hardest days in the lab: day-five embryos to assess for freezing, transfer or biopsy, plus fertilisation checks and patient calls.
Two embryologists were routinely working 12-hour weekend shifts, or extra staff had to be brought in, and the overtime rippled through the following week. The options on the table were recruiting more staff, introducing shift systems, or finding a way to balance the workload itself.
How the trigger timing tool works in practice
The clinic chose FertilAI's trigger timing tool, which supports the clinical team in deciding when to trigger final oocyte maturation. Based on a dataset of nearly 55,000 cycles, it predicts the number of mature (MII) oocytes for each possible trigger day. For many patients there is one clearly optimal day, but for almost half there are two or three days with a comparable expected yield. That is exactly the flexibility a clinic needs to spread its theatre lists.
In the recording, Dr. Hunter walks through a patient from her day-six scan to the trigger decision. The tool also shows how many retrievals are already booked for each day against a daily limit the clinic sets itself (seven at Manchester Fertility). Instead of each doctor deciding on the patient in front of them, the team sees the whole week. You can jump straight to the live demo in MedITEX IVF at 18:24.
What changed: workload
Manchester Fertility compared six weeks before and six weeks after go-live. The number of cycles and egg collections per week stayed the same, but the distribution changed noticeably:
The effect appeared quickly, as soon as the doctors were comfortable using the tool.
What changed: clinical outcomes
Balancing a schedule is only worth it if patients don't pay for it. With FertilAI's statistics team, Manchester Fertility analysed ICSI cycles from December to February against July to early October, with comparable age groups in both periods. The clinic reported:
According to Dr. Hunter, the effect held up when individual weeks were left out of the analysis, so it is not carried by a single strong week. For patients over 41, who are most likely to opt for PGT, an extra embryo can mean the difference between one treatment cycle and two.
Why the EMR is the foundation
As Francesca put it in her introduction: AI is only as good as the data it can work with. MedITEX IVF is patient and clinic management software for fertility centres, documenting the patient journey from the first consultation through lab work to treatment outcome, and connecting scheduling, patient communication, lab and ultrasound devices around it. At Manchester Fertility, follicle measurements arrive from the ultrasound machine and hormone results from the external laboratory directly in MedITEX IVF. FertilAI uses that existing data, so the clinical team enters nothing twice, and the trigger timing view opens from the patient's follicle overview in MedITEX in two clicks. Once the trigger is set, the clinic plans the collection in MedITEX Scheduler.
From the Q&A
The recording ends with an open Q&A. Topics include how the tool handles clinics with several doctors and fixed theatre days, where the training data comes from, data security, and whether AI will replace doctors. Dr. Hunter's answer to the last one: no. Her team introduced the tool as a "helpful friend" in the trigger meeting, an impartial second opinion when fifteen patients look ready and there are six slots.
Want to talk about it?
If you'd like to see how MedITEX and FertilAI could work in your clinic, or book a demo, contact our sales team at sales@nexus-meditex.de.
