Ethical Implementation of Artificial Intelligence to Select Embryos in
  In Vitro Fertilization
  AI has the potential to revolutionize many areas of healthcare. Radiology,
dermatology, and ophthalmology are some of the areas most likely to be impacted
in the near future, and they have received significant attention from the
broader research community. But AI techniques are now also starting to be used
in in vitro fertilization (IVF), in particular for selecting which embryos to
transfer to the woman. The contribution of AI to IVF is potentially
significant, but must be done carefully and transparently, as the ethical
issues are significant, in part because this field involves creating new
people. We first give a brief introduction to IVF and review the use of AI for
embryo selection. We discuss concerns with the interpretation of the reported
results from scientific and practical perspectives. We then consider the
broader ethical issues involved. We discuss in detail the problems that result
from the use of black-box methods in this context and advocate strongly for the
use of interpretable models. Importantly, there have been no published trials
of clinical effectiveness, a problem in both the AI and IVF communities, and we
therefore argue that clinical implementation at this point would be premature.
Finally, we discuss ways for the broader AI community to become involved to
ensure scientifically sound and ethically responsible development of AI in IVF.
