CASA: A Suitable Tool for Epidemiology and Reprotox Studies

Basic computer-aided sperm analysis (CASA) was first developed in the 1980s to track sperm motion. However, like all applications of information technology, considerable advances were made during the 1990s and 2000s. Although CASA was found to have limitations in a clinical setting, it was especially useful for research applications in human and animal studies. Today, CASA systems have improved significantly and are considered a reliable and objective research and diagnostic instrument in the medical and veterinary laboratories and in field animal studies. Due to these improvements, current CASA systems are user-friendly, fast and able to produce vast amounts of data, not only for sperm motility (including kinematics), concentration, but also improved imaging for sperm morphology. Additionally, certain systems are able to assess a number of other parameters related to sperm functionality including DNA fragmentation. This is very useful for epidemiology and reproductive toxicology studies, as evidenced in the number of publications on the use of CASA systems for human and animal sperm analysis.