A new method to improve movement tracking of human sperms

One of the determinants of sperm quality is the motility of spermatozoa. The motility of spermatozoa is measured by microscopic sperm test. Conventionally; the determination of sperm motility is performed by experts, in which the judgment tends to be subjective. The existence of Computer-Assisted Sperm Analysis (CASA) is beneficial in solving problems related to the emergence of subjectivity in the determination of sperm motility. Generally, CASA and researchers in this field use phase contrast microscopes to obtain images with higher contrast. In this study, the position and motility determinations of spermatozoa in the video were performed using video records taken from a bright field microscope with low contrast, along with various other deficiencies. With a combination of several stages of works, namely frame difference background subtraction, contrastsetting with Otsu threshold as an indicator, filtering process using mathematical morphology to determine the position of objects, as well as linear regression and root mean square value (RMS) calculations. From the results of experimental tests performed on human spermatozoa video data, the above method indicated that the positions of sperm motility from tracking results had recognizable trajectories based on the average distance position to the linear regression line, with an RMS threshold of 10. There were ten progressive spermatozoa and four non-progressive spermatozoa. The method used successfully determined 14 human spermatozoa. There were 71% progressive spermatozoa, while the remaining 29% were non-progressive. Under the WHO 2010 guidelines, a 71% percentage indicates normal sperm motility.