An egg bank in Spain is using face recognition technology to match people with donors who look like them.聽The idea is that this way prospective mothers will get a child who resembles them even though they are not genetically related.
Egg donation is relatively common in Spain compared to other European nations. It has strict laws protecting the anonymity of the donor, which makes it a popular destination for women across Europe seeking eggs for IVF.
Basic physical details such as ethnicity, hair colour, and eye colour are recorded at the time of donation, but this still leaves a lot to the imagination. So Spanish company Ovobank are using face recognition algorithms to match prospective mothers with donor eggs.
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Their face-matching service provides a score of how much the donor looks like the mother, says at Ovobank, who created the service with her husband following her own experience of IVF.
鈥淧atients stress about the resemblance of the child,鈥� says Yus. 鈥淪o for us it is a very beautiful service鈥�.
The face-matching service was announced at the European Society of Human Reproduction and Embryology annual meeting in Barcelona, earlier this month. They have launched the service in two fertility clinics in Barcelona and Marbella.
The system works by taking a photograph of the donor when they donate the egg. An algorithm analyses their face and records key features in an encrypted database. A prospective patient can take a picture of themselves with a smartphone or tablet, and see how many available donations are from women who match her appearance.
The system took a year to develop, says Yus, the bulk of which involved creating an algorithm that could reliably match faces.
You look like your mother
For some people having a child closely resemble them is an important part of starting a family. Selma from London, who wished to keep her surname anonymous, turned to egg donation after undergoing three unsuccessful cycles of IVF with her own eggs.
Though her UK clinician is able to see photos of the donor, she is not. 鈥淎lready the thought of you using someone else鈥檚 egg is impersonal, even though you鈥檙e carrying it, you think I鈥檓 carrying someone else鈥檚 child,鈥� she says.
Selma didn鈥檛 use Ovobank鈥檚 service, but says that using face matching technology to get a stronger physical resemblance could make her feel closer to a child.
The service has good science behind it, says , at the Catholic University of Leuven (KUL) in Belgium. 鈥淲e can see a lot of genetic information from faces,鈥� he says.
The forehead, eyes, nose, and chin are all under strong genetic control, says Claes. This means that a baby from an egg donated by someone with similar facial features to the recipient, is more likely to resemble the recipient.
Using the donor鈥檚 face, 鈥測ou can select someone who is more close to you than a random person,鈥� says Claes. However, he warns that the strength of any resemblance depends on the size of the database matches are drawn from.
Many IVF clinics, including Ovobank, already offer genetic screening services which comb the donor鈥檚 DNA for recessive mutations that could lead to inherited diseases such as cystic fibrosis and fragile-X syndrome, and also to ensure it is compatible with the father鈥檚 sperm.
However, not enough is known yet about the genetics underlying our appearance to match patients with donors who resemble them based on DNA alone. 鈥淔acial matching will become obsolete, but we are not advanced enough to say 鈥榯hese are the genetic elements you need to match on to increase the chance of a facial match鈥�,鈥� says Claes.
