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Comment by positr0n | Hacker News Reader

Probably some grad student pipets a precise quantity of scorpian semen onto a slide, perhaps with a dye to aid the process, and manually counts the number of sperm with a microscope.

Human sperm tests are done using a similar procedure depending on what you are looking for.

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Fascinating; apparently you can perform a sperm count test on yourself with nothing more than a microscope: https://www.hellomotherhood.com/article/94302-read-clearblue...

and a spreadsheet: https://web.archive.org/web/20070224203309/http://www.fertil...

There's a high-quality video here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T9_XkaXCXqc&ab_channel=Advan...

I'm just surprised it's theoretically possible to do it yourself. Tests are upwards of $100.

Hey, this is great info. Any machine learning engineers have a bunch of spare time on their hands?

Interesting line of thinking. I guess you could pipe a microscope's video feed into a YOLO model and do a count. The hard part would be making it cost effective. Legacy (YC S19) seems to be capturing this market: https://www.givelegacy.com/

$200 is still a hefty price though.

There are automated sperm sample analyzers already, that give sperm concentration, motility (broken down by rapid, slow, and non), morphology, velocity, and more.

Here's a promotional video from 2008 from a maker of such devices [1]. Here's a 2015 video from them showing a newer model [2].

I'm not sure how they actually work. Given the age it probably isn't machine learning.

The same company also sells a home test kit, under the name Yo, which might use machine learning [3]. It uses your smart phone camera. There is also a PC/Mac version that looks like it includes its own camera. $69.95 for either kit, $45.95 for refills for the consumables for 2 tests, $89.95 for 4 tests.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=krakvOT-7xI

[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ukIns4rPgHw

[3] https://www.yospermtest.com/how-it-works/

Not that surprising. Doing my own is one thing. For counting someone else's sperm, $100 seems pretty low.

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