Intracytoplasmic sperm injection is a fertility treatment that is typically used alongside IVF. In most cases where Dr Reyftmann recommends using ICSI, it’s because there are significant issues with the sperm’s ability to find the egg and fertilise it.
In conventional IVF, the female partner’s retrieved eggs and male partner’s sperm are combined in a laboratory dish. Though we put them together, the sperm still needs to swim to the egg and put in the hard work to penetrate through its outer layers before it can fertilise it. With severe male factor infertility, there is often a problem with low sperm count or concentration, motility (swimming ability) or morphology (shape and size, affecting ability to penetrate the egg).
Learn more about the ICSI process below.
This step is exactly the same as the typical IVF procedure. Our clinic nurses will coach you on how to self-administer hormone injections at home.
These hormones encourage your ovaries to develop and release more eggs so that we have more to work with when it comes to the fertilisation step. During this process, we’ll monitor the state of your ovarian follicles and the eggs they’re developing with frequent ultrasound scans and blood tests.
The egg retrieval step also follows the same process as the IVF procedure. You’ll have a trigger injection or nasal spray of another hormone medication, which signals the eggs you’ve produced to mature. They are then ready to be collected through a quick day procedure.
This procedure takes about half an hour and is performed under light sedation. Dr Reyftman will use a fine needle and an ultrasound-guided probe to extract each microscopic egg directly from your ovaries. The eggs are transported directly to our lab under specialised conditions.
This step is where the process deviates slightly from the usual IVF procedure. Your partner produces a semen sample, typically on the day that we intend to perform the intracytoplasmic sperm injection. This sample is taken to our lab for examination and preparation.
Where eggs and sperm are combined in a dish to fertilise in their own time with IVF, the ICSI procedure involves our embryologist taking a single sperm cell and injecting it directly into each mature egg. Injecting the sperm straight into the egg means we can bypass the need for your partner’s sperm to swim to the egg and penetrate it on their own. These fertilised eggs are then grown in our advanced embryo incubators for a few days. You can choose to have preimplantation genetic testing on the embryos at this stage.
Around day 5 of development, our embryologist will assess each embryo. We hope that at least one has grown to a stage that makes it viable for transfer to your womb to continue through pregnancy.
The embryo transfer procedure is usually quick and painless with only a little discomfort. Dr Reyftmann performs this through a long, thin tube called a catheter to insert the tiny embryo into your uterus, where we expect it will implant and grow. Any extra healthy embryos we produce can be frozen and stored to use for your next pregnancy if you choose.
Around day 14 after your embryo transfer, we’ll organise a pregnancy blood test for you. This gives us the most accurate and conclusive results.
Taking a pregnancy test too early after your procedure increases the risk of giving you an incorrect result, usually in the form of a false positive. This means the test suggests that you’re pregnant when you’re not. So though you may be feeling anxious and impatient, it’s important to avoid doing a home pregnancy urine test too early.
Intracytoplasmic sperm injection is a specialised form of IVF. Dr Reyftmann will advise you whether he recommends this approach, which will be based on semen analysis.
ICSI may be recommended in cases of:
ICSI is also often the next step for couples who have tried standard IVF with little success at the fertilisation step. Men who have undergone a vasectomy removal procedure that was ineffective or resulted in low sperm quantity or quality may also benefit from ICSI.
