In-Vitro Fertilisation (IVF) with ICSI

During your first consultation, your fertility specialist will thoroughly assess your medical history, and discuss available treatment types with you. You may be asked to undergo further health checks, to help tailor your treatment and maximise your chances of a successful pregnancy. These include bloodwork, semen analysis (if applicable), ultrasound of the uterus and other tests.

After receiving your test results, you will chat with your doctor to review the findings and solidify your personalised treatment plan. Your committed patient coordinator will then provide you with a detailed breakdown of the associated costs, for your approval.

Once you have approved the costs, you are ready to begin treatment. Your doctor will prescribe a tailored hormonal medication plan to stimulate the development of multiple mature eggs in your ovaries. We will control the progress of the cycle, until we can verify that the number and size of the growing follicles are compatible with the obtention of viable eggs.

Egg retrieval is conducted under ultrasound monitoring, by an experienced IVF doctor. This operation is performed under sedation and takes around 15 minutes. On the same day, a member of our team will liaise with you to arrange the scheduling of the embryo transfer. Eggs obtained from this procedure are then placed into a special culture medium.

On the same day as the egg retrieval, your partner will be provided with a private room at our clinic where he can collect a semen sample by ejaculating into a sterile container. This method allows for the most straightforward and direct collection of sperm. In cases of severe male infertility, when sperm is not present in the ejaculate, sperm may need to be directly extracted from the testicles (TESE or micro-TESE) or the epididymis (TESA) using a minor surgical procedure. These methods are always performed by a urologist.
ICSI can also be done with frozen sperm, unless in very bad prognosis cases.

Once the semen sample is collected, we will analyse it in the laboratory to assess its count and motility (movement). We clean and concentrate the sperm, so we can choose the strongest, most active, and well-shaped sperm for fertilisation.

In ICSI cycles, instead of placing eggs with a sample of more than 100,000 spermatozoa overnight, our embryologists will use a more efficient technique to maximise fertilisation rates: they inject every mature egg with a pre-selected sperm. This technique is called Intracytoplasmic sperm injection (ICSI) and it is indispensable in male factor infertility cases.

Once fertilisation has taken place, your embryos will be kept in a special incubator under optimal conditions, until the embryo transfer day. The incubator allows us to continuously monitor your embryos and carefully assess their development without touching them. At Ferticentro all of our treatments are done in the Embryoscope and embryo development is carefully monitored 24/7, with the characteristics of embryo development being assessed through complex artificial intelligence algorithms.

If you are undergoing a freeze-all cycle, the obtained blastocysts will be vitrified by our talented team of embryologists until the Embryo Transfer phase.

The embryo transfer procedure is one of the final stages of the IVF process. Your doctor will place one or two embryo(s) in your uterus to try to obtain a pregnancy. In the case of a freeze-all cycle, a Frozen Embryo Transfer (FET) will be performed.

Any viable surplus embryos that are not used in the fresh treatment can be frozen in our cryo-storage facilities. These can be used in a subsequent frozen embryo transfer cycle (for a second child or if the first attempt fails).

After the embryo transfer you will need to wait for 12 days for a pregnancy test.