NEW YORK — A 30-year-old infertile woman gave birth after surgeons removed her ovaries and reimplanted tissue they treated in a lab, researchers report.

The experimental technique was only tried in a small group of Japanese women with a specific kind of infertility problem, but scientists hope it can also help women in their early 40s who have trouble getting pregnant because of their age.

The new mother gave birth to a son in Tokyo last December, and she and the child continue to be healthy, said Dr. Kazuhiro Kawamura of the St. Marianna University School of Medicine in Kawasaki, Japan. He and others describe the technique in a report published online Monday by the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

The mother, who was not identified, had been diagnosed with primary ovarian insufficiency, an uncommon form of infertility sometimes called premature menopause. It appears in about 1 percent of women of childbearing age.

That leaves women with only a 5 percent to 10 percent chance of having a baby unless they get treated. The standard treatment is using donor eggs.

After the experimental procedure, Kawamura and colleagues were able to recover eggs from five of their 27 patients. One woman went on to have a miscarriage, one did not get pregnant, and two more have not yet attempted pregnancy, Kawamura said in an e-mail.

The approach differs from what has been done to preserve fertility in some cancer patients, who had normal ovarian tissue removed and stored while they underwent cancer treatments, and then put back. The new work involved ovaries that were failing to function normally.

In the ovary, eggs mature in structures called follicles. For women with the condition the new study targeted, the follicles are either missing or failing to produce eggs. The experimental treatment was designed to stimulate dormant follicles.