Yasuyuki Mio
The Modern Laboratory · People
The Modern Laboratory
Yasuyuki Mio
A Tottori gynaecologist who built his own time-lapse camera system and filmed embryos from fertilisation to hatching.
A doctor from Tottori. Yasuyuki Mio graduated from Tottori University School of Medicine in 1974. He chose obstetrics and gynaecology partly because Kazuo Maeda, already known for his ultrasound and fetal monitoring work, taught there. Mio was in the department's endocrine group in 1978 when news came of the first IVF baby, and he remembers wanting to take part in that kind of medicine.
Learning IVF. On Maeda's advice he developed egg collection guided by ultrasound, which his clinic dates to 1985 in Japan. Maeda then encouraged him to train with the IVF team at the University of Adelaide. He spent ten months there, learning to make culture media, measure hormones and collect eggs. In 1993 he opened the Mio Fertility Clinic in Yonago, built around the teamwork he had seen in Australia.
Building a camera. Inspired by the 1997 Adelaide films of Dianna Payne and her colleagues, Mio's team began building a high-resolution time-lapse culture system in 2001. He has described making it with local machinists and a small workshop in Osaka. In 2008, with Maeda, he described in the American Journal of Obstetrics and Gynecology films of embryos from fertilisation to hatching, and of identical twins beginning to form from blastocysts in culture. His clinic records awards for its embryo videos from the American Society for Reproductive Medicine in 2009 and in several later years.
Other work. His clinic records a birth in 1997 after sperm injection for a man with Klinefelter syndrome, the first in Japan. In 2017 he presided over the annual meeting of the Japan Society of Fertilization and Implantation, and in 2015 he received a commendation from Japan's Minister of Health, Labour and Welfare. More recently his team has studied removing the zona pellucida at the pronuclear stage. He once said that if he were given magic, he would use it to help every patient become pregnant.
Also see: Kazuo Maeda, Dianna Payne, Sean P. Flaherty
About the sources
- Mio Y, Yumoto K, Sugishima M, Nakaoka M, Shimura T, Tsounapi P. Morphokinetic features in human embryos: analysis by our original high-resolution time-lapse cinematography. Summary of the past two decades. Reproductive Medicine and Biology 2024;23:e12578. PMC11077290 (abstract, introduction and acknowledgements).
- Mio Fertility Clinic, Yonago: "About MFC" page, director profile and clinic history (mfc.or.jp/about_mfc), opened 7 October 2026.
- Doctors File (doctorsfile.jp), interview with Yasuyuki Mio, Mio Fertility Clinic, interview date 16 August 2022, page last updated 11 June 2026.
- Mio Y, Maeda K. Time-lapse cinematography of dynamic changes occurring during in vitro development of human embryos. American Journal of Obstetrics and Gynecology 2008;199(6):660.e1–5. PubMed 18823872.
- Yumoto K, et al., Flaherty S, Mio Y. Unstable osmolality of microdrops cultured in non-humidified incubators. Journal of Assisted Reproduction and Genetics 2019;36:1571–1577. PubMed 31267335.
- Mio Y, Tanikawa M, Terado H, Toda T, Wada T, Nagata N, Kikugawa A, Maeda K. Ultrasonic oocyte collection for IVF-ET and a case of successful pregnancy [in Japanese]. Nihon Sanka Fujinka Gakkai Zasshi 1987;39:307–308. PubMed 2950189.
- Europe PMC search, Mio Y with time-lapse cinematography, 2008 to 2026 (including papers of 2012, 2014, 2016, 2020, 2024 and 2025).
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Compiled with AI-assisted research and checked against the original sources. Not yet peer-reviewed. Corrections are warmly welcomed.
