In-Vitro Fertilisation (IVF) with ICSI

You’ll start the process with an initial medical consultation and testing, during which a fertility specialist will thoroughly review your medical history and discuss potential treatment options with you. Additional assessments, such as blood tests, semen analysis (where relevant), and an ultrasound of the uterus, among others, may be necessary to tailor your treatment effectively and improve your chances of a successful pregnancy. After analysing these test results, you will meet with your doctor again to refine and finalise your personalised treatment plan. Following this, your dedicated patient coordinator will provide you with a detailed breakdown of the costs involved for your approval.

During your IVF journey, ovarian stimulation plays a key role by encouraging your ovaries to produce multiple eggs instead of the single egg that’s typically released during a natural menstrual cycle. This step involves taking fertility medications containing hormones like FSH (Follicle Stimulating Hormone) and LH (Luteinizing Hormone) for about 8-14 days. These hormones stimulate your ovaries to develop multiple follicles, with each one potentially housing an egg. Throughout this phase, you’ll undergo regular monitoring, including blood tests and ultrasound scans, to track the development of the follicles and adjust your medication dosage as needed. The aim is to collect a sufficient number of healthy eggs to enhance the chances of successful fertilisation after they’re retrieved and combined with sperm in the lab. You might experience some side effects from the medication, such as bloating, mood swings, or discomfort at the injection sites, but these are typically temporary and manageable.

The egg retrieval stage of your IVF treatment is a carefully orchestrated medical procedure aimed at collecting the mature eggs from your ovaries. After undergoing ovarian stimulation, you’ll be scheduled for this procedure, which is typically performed under mild sedation to ensure your comfort. Using ultrasound guidance, a thin needle is passed through the vaginal wall to gently aspirate the eggs from the follicles in your ovaries. This process usually takes about 15 to 20 minutes. Eggs collected during the procedure are then placed into a special culture medium.

The sperm sample, which can be freshly collected (on the day of fertilisation) or previously cryopreserved, is treated and optimised in Procriar’s PMA laboratory in order to select the strongest sperm that are most likely to be viable.

In IVF with ICSI (“intracytoplasmic sperm microinjection”), our embryologists treat the sperm and individually select the sperm to be used in the treatment process. They then inject a single sperm into each available egg in a controlled and precise manner.

ICSI is usually recommended when the concentration, mobility or morphology of the sperm is altered or when the fertilisation rate is to be optimised.

Once fertilisation occurs, we place your embryos in an advanced incubator, known as the Embryoscope®, where they receive meticulous care under ideal conditions leading up to the day of embryo transfer. This state-of-the-art technology enables uninterrupted observation and evaluation of your embryos’ growth without any interference. At Procriar, we use the Embryoscope® for all treatments, benefitting from its continuous, precise monitoring capabilities powered by advanced artificial intelligence algorithms to track embryo development. 

In scenarios where a freeze-all cycle is opted for, our experienced embryologists will securely freeze the embryos, maintaining them in perfect condition until it’s time for the Embryo Transfer stage.

The embryo transfer, a crucial step in the IVF process, involves placing one or two embryos into your uterus in the hope of achieving a pregnancy. If it’s a freeze-all cycle, a Frozen Embryo Transfer (FET) is performed.

Following the embryo transfer, you’ll need to wait for 12 days to take a pregnancy test.