Doctors at Dubai’s Fakih IVF performed the procedure on a 32-year-old man
For the first time in the UAE, and in the Middle East as a whole, doctors have used an AI-assisted sperm detection tool to locate extremely rare sperm, and bring about pregnancy in a couple via IVF treatment.
Doctors at the Dubai-based Fakih IVF conducted the procedure on a 32-year-old man with Non-Obstructive Azoospermia (NOA), the most severe form of male infertility, and his wife is now 14 weeks into a normal, healthy pregnancy. The cutting-edge tool – called SpermSearchAI – was developed by NeoGenix Biosciences, an Australian company with which the clinic has an on-going collaboration.
The young couple were, in fact, the first on whom the new technology was trialled at Fakih IVF. “We informed them about the AI software coming, so they actually postponed their surgery, and waited for SpermSearchAI to get involved,” says Dr. Ranjith Ramasamy, consultant urologist at Fakih IVF, Dubai. “I’m very happy it got utilised in their case and proved to be useful.”
The procedure in such severe forms of male infertility – where very few sperm are produced, and there are none at all found in semen analysis – is MicroTESE (Microsurgical Testicular Sperm Extraction), a biopsy where testicular tissue is extracted, and then studied under a microscope in the laboratory to find viable sperm. This is where SpermSearchAI, a convolutional neural network trained to detect live sperm in real time, proves invaluable.
“In the patients that we’ve treated so far, the software has reduced the search time by 50 per cent,” says Dr. Ramasamy. “It’s also helpful in identifying more viable sperm. If the embryologist is able to find, say, five to 10 sperm manually, the AI is able to find us about 20 to 30, so our options of using better-quality sperm with IVF has improved dramatically.”
The AI tool is currently being trialled at clinics globally to bring hope in such cases, but it is of particular significance in this region, according to Dr. Ramasamy.
“Unlike the US, Europe, Australia or India, there are no donor sperm options here in the Middle East,” he says. “Therefore, we need technologies like this in the laboratory to find those rare sperm, and give the option of parenthood – not just biological parenthood, but parenthood – to these couples.”
This article originally appeared in the Gulf News. You can find it here.
The private sector is set to play a crucial role in the growth of Dubai’s dynamic and rapidly developing healthcare industry, says Ghada Sawalmah, CEO of Gargash Hospital.
“Since private hospitals are the primary investors, it is likely that the healthcare sector will experience growth driven by private hospitals in the future,” she explains. “We anticipate an increase in the number of private hospitals entering the market to take a share of the pie.”
According to current projections by the Dubai Healthcare City Authority, the UAE’s expenditure on healthcare is set to rise to Dh126 billion by 2027, with spending by the private sector growing at a projected CAGR of 8.8 per cent, compared to a CAGR of 7.5 per cent for the public sector.
Gargash Hospital is part of this burgeoning ecosystem of private hospitals, becoming the first female-owned and -led hospital in the country when it opened the doors just before the start of the COVID-19 pandemic. But Sawalmah’s understanding of the healthcare business stretches much further back – to her childhood, growing up as the daughter of two doctors, and watching her mother, Dr Husnia Gargash’s trailblazing journey as the country’s foremost fertility expert.
“I would often go to the clinics and hospitals where they worked since I was very young. I used to carefully watch my parents and their coworkers and how their actions affected the patients,” she recalls. “Being raised in a household of entrepreneurs allowed me to cultivate and enhance my business skills as well. I came to understand that my interest lay more in overseeing the business side of healthcare rather than practising as a doctor.”
The pandemic effect
That deep-seated knowledge helped Sawalmah steer the hospital through the difficult Covid years. “As a new hospital, we had to make numerous changes to our patient flow, employee management, and facility management,” she explains. “The pandemic proved to us that survival was a team sport, not only within the hospital but also within the healthcare community in Dubai. Sharing of knowledge, equipment, human resources, and PPEs was the need of the hour, and everyone stepped up to the task.”
The remarkable response to the pandemic by the UAE is one of the key reasons for the projected growth in the private healthcare sector in the upcoming years, believes Sawalmah. “After the pandemic, there has been a rise in the number of people visiting the UAE, whether for tourism or employment purposes. A significant factor for this increase is the swift and effective management of the pandemic by the UAE government.”
According to government estimates, the population of Dubai is predicted to reach 5.8 million by 2040, and when it comes to medical tourism, the UAE and Dubai, in particular, tops the list as the number one destination in the region. In 2022, the emirate received a record 674,000 medical tourists from Asia, Europe and the Middle East and North Africa, who spent Dh992 million, an increase of Dh262 million from 2021.
“This indicates that a larger number of healthcare facilities will be needed to cater to the healthcare needs of the increasing population and medical visitors,” says Sawalmah. “There will be a rise in the use of new technologies and the creation of Centres of Excellence (CoE) to draw in medical tourists. The current players will either enhance their range of services or establish strategic collaborations to grow their patient base.”
Developing such strategic collaborations is the focus of Gargash Hospital’s own evolution in the near future, including major partnerships with the likes of Tarabichi Stammberger Day Surgical Center, Swift Day Surgical Center and BritishCare. “We aim to establish ourselves as strategic allies and collaborate with other healthcare professionals to offer top-notch healthcare services to our patients,” she says.
Digital healthcare
At the heart of all this development is, of course, technology. Driven by the learnings from the COVID-19 crisis, the UAE’s digital healthcare market is projected to grow from $1.06 billion (Dh3.67 billion) in 2022 to $4.42 billion by 2030, a CAGR of a whopping 19.6 per cent, according to recent industry estimates.
However, this rapid growth and assimilation of new technologies comes with a unique set of challenges for private healthcare providers, who need to juggle the costs of the technology with shifting government regulations.
“The most recent technologies demand significant financial investments for acquisition as well as implementation,” she says. “Another obstacle is combining the latest technology with the current healthcare information system (HIS), which may involve upgrading or modifying the existing HIS, resulting in additional expenses. The regulatory requirements for digital healthcare and new technologies are always changing.”
This article originally appeared in the Gulf News. You can find it here
CMC Hospital treats tachycardia in a dextro-transposed heart with multiple ablations
It was a case no one else was ready to take on – a heart condition so rare that even the Mayo Clinic has recorded just 30 cases in the past 20 years – and a patient with a history of going into cardiac arrest during surgical procedures. But for Dr Khaled Awad, Electrophysiologist and Interventional Cardiologist at Clemenceau Medical Center Hospital (CMC Hospital), it was a chance to give a woman her life back.
“Everybody was telling her, ‘we can’t do it’, but she was really suffering,” says Dr. Awad. “For years, even with high dosages of anti-arrhythmia drugs, she would have a heart rate going up to 180 for many hours, every couple of days.” For people with her condition, this was potentially life-threatening, he says, because it could trigger sudden cardiac death.
Born with dextro-transposition – a rare congenital heart defect where the position of the pulmonary artery and aorta are swapped – and the survivor of open-heart surgery as an infant, this 36-year-old woman from Saudi Arabia is a medical rarity for the simple reason that most born with this condition don’t live long, passing away due to heart failure. It took the doctors at CMC Hospital three weeks of preparation, reading the sparse medical literature and doing imaging scans before taking on this “once-in-a-lifetime case”, doing a tricky three-hour procedure involving multiple ablations – introducing a catheter into her blood vessel, and using heat or cold energy to create burns on the heart to stop the electrical signals causing the tachycardia.
“One week later, she is off medications, doing well and happy to live,” says Dr Awad. “She will be able to watch her daughter go off to university, where she plans to study to become a doctor, perhaps even a cardiologist!”
This and other cutting-edge procedures are the mainstay of the Electrophysiology and Pacemaker Clinic in Dubai at CMC Hospital – one of the few such specialised clinics in the city for the treatment of all disorders of heart rhythms. These include the implantation of sophisticated Cardiac Resynchronization Therapy (CRT) devices to prevent heart failure, and the latest therapies such as Conduction System Pacing (CSP), a revolutionary treatment where the pacemaker closely mimics the natural physiological pacing of the heart, considerably reducing adverse outcomes – done two months ago at CMC.
“To the best of my knowledge, this is the first time it has been done at a private hospital in the entire MENA region,” says Dr Awad, one of only eight specialised electrophysiologists in the UAE.
Growing word of mouth means that the clinic has patients coming to them from different countries such as Pakistan and Lebanon for treatment. The reason is that electrophysiology – the study of the electrical impulses governing heart rhythms – as a specialised discipline is relatively new. Often, it is interventional cardiologists who deal with these devices and procedures, and they might lack the expertise to do so.
“There are a lot of young people who have a pacemaker put in, even when the indication was not correct. It hurts me when I see them,” Dr Awad says, adding that it could mean multiple procedures to maintain or replace the device during their lifetime. “An electrophysiologist has special training and perspective, and we might not see the indication for a pacemaker or an intervention at all.”
Access to specialists of this sort is especially crucial because these procedures are so very sophisticated and delicate. “Everything in electrophysiology is about millimetres; if you’re millimetres away during an ablation, you could damage or perforate the heart,” he says.
This is clearly a specialty that is set to grow in this region in the near future, and the Electrophysiology and Pacemaker Clinic at CMC Hospital is right at the forefront of this change.
This article originally appeared in the Gulf News. You can find it here.
Divya Kumar 