A Computer Aided Tool for the Assessment of Human Sperm Morphology

Sperm morphology has a key role in the determination of fertility in men. Nowadays assessments of sperm morphology are mostly done with subjective criteria. This article discusses details of the stages implemented in a computer aided tool for the objective analysis of human sperm morphology, commonly known as Automated Sperm Morphology Analyzer (ASMA). The first stage described is the detection and extraction of individual spermatozoon of an image containing multiple spermatozoa and biological rests as well. A novel method for segmenting objects in microscopic images into its constituent´s parts is proposed. The method called nth-fusion introduced in this paper is the framework of the segmentation algorithm implemented in this computer aided tool, this algorithm has been tested with a 250 spermatozoon images database and the results are quite accurate. The final stage, feature extraction and classification, estimates the morphological parameters of human spermatozoon and classifies them according to the World Healthcare Organization criteria.