Overcoming Infertility

In-vitro fertilization (IVF) is an assisted reproductive technique where the egg cells are fertilized with the sperm cells outside the womb. The fertilized cell is placed on a culture medium until it grows into an embryo, which will then be implanted back to the mother’s womb.

Intrauterine insemination (IUI) is an assisted pregnancy technique where select sperm cells will be inserted directly to the mother’s womb during her ovulation period.

Preimplantation Genetic Screening (PGS) is a method to screen for anomalies in an embryo’s chromosomes to help reduce risks of genetic disorders, such as Down syndrome (extra genetic material in chromosome 21) and Turner syndrome (lack of a single X chromosome on a female).

As its name implies, Basic Fertility Screening (BFS) is a diagnostic method to figure out how you and your spouse’s reproductive health is like. BFS allows doctors to find out if there are any problems, complications, or other things of note regarding your sexual health. Using this information, it’s much easier to determine what treatments and programs you will need to take care of your health, and most importantly, safely achieve your parenthood. Rest assured, your medical information is of course safe with us, and we will never disclose it to anybody else.

Ovulation induction is an assisted pregnancy program where medications that induce or stimulate ovulation help the growth of egg cells to reach a certain normal size, which should be considerably mature and ready to be fertilized by sperm cells. In this program, the father’s condition is often categorized based on sperm analysis results.

Also known as mature oocyte cryopreservation. Egg freezing is a technique to freeze the egg cells of a mother so that the egg cells (mature oocytes) picked up one day can be fertilized at a later date. Egg freezing has helped thousands of parents in achieving pregnancy through IVF. Several factors that play into the need for eggs to be frozen include the therapies a mother may have to undergo that could cause infertility or early menopause (such as chemotherapy for cancer), or other decisions such as the want to delay pregnancy (to first further career, for instance) while also preserving the better state of their younger egg cells.

Also known as sperm banking or semen cryopreservation. Sperm freezing is the technique to freeze the father’s sperm so that the cells taken at one point can be reused at a later date to fertilize egg cells. Several factors that may influence the need for sperm freezing may be therapies that could cause infertility in the future (such as chemotherapy), required operations on the father that may heavily affect or impair sperm cells during collection (such as TESE/PESA), or long terms of separation between the father and mother during IVF procedure (such as due to work constraints).

Also known as embryo cryopreservation or embryo cryostorage. After a father and mother go through an IVF procedure, there are often more than one successfully reproducing embryo. Through this process, embryos that are not transferred to the womb may be stored for use at a later date.

In our lab, we use vitrification for cryostorage. This increases the chance of success in the case of an embryo transfer.

Our embryologist will determine whether the father and mother’s embryo fits the bill to be cryostored. The embryo must be of certain quality, because otherwise the embryo would not survive the vitrification and its future defrosting. An embryo can be cryostored for up to 10 years.