Social consequences of recurrent pregnancy loss and maternal myths, past, present, and future in Japan.

In Japan, the myth of motherhood, the idea that every woman harbours maternal love and that a woman only becomes a full-fledged woman after giving birth, has existed for a long time. However, there has been a limited number of studies concerning this motherhood myth in patients with recurrent pregnancy loss (RPL). The present study aimed to examine the experiences of maternal myths in patients with RPL and to determine whether maternal myths affect depression.

Evaluation of artificial intelligence using time-lapse images of IVF embryos to predict live birth.

Research Question: Can artificial intelligence (AI) improve the prediction of live births based on embryo images?

Design: The AI system was created by using the Attention Branch Network associated with deep learning to predict the probability of live birth from 141,444 images recorded by time-lapse imaging of 470 transferred embryos, of which 91 resulted in live birth and 379 resulted in non-live birth that included implantation failure, biochemical pregnancy and clinical miscarriage. The possibility that the calculated confidence scores of each embryo and the focused areas visualized in each embryo image can help predict subsequent live birth was examined.

Results: The AI system for the first time successfully visualized embryo features in focused areas that had potential to distinguish between live and non-live births.

Attitude and perceptions toward miscarriage: a survey of a general population in Japan.

Miscarriage is the greatest complication of pregnancy, and 70-80% of early miscarriages are mostly due to chromosomal abnormalities in the embryo. There is no evidence that stress is a direct cause of miscarriage. Despite these findings, in a national US survey on the causes of miscarriage, many Americans mistakenly attributed miscarriage to the mental state or behavior of the women.