IVF Fertility Blog

  Let me introduce you to people known as embryologists . In layman terms, they are simply those who make babies in the lab. Early in my career, there was an incident related to work that I will never forget. My dad was out for his evening walk when I ran to catch up with him. He proudly introduced me to a bunch of his senior-citizen friends, “This is my daughter and she makes babies!” I could feel all the old hearts there do a somersault. I was red with embarrassment. “Make babies for other people in a lab with the help of IVF,” I corrected him. My dad laughed, patted my back and said, “Yes, it is the same thing.” In my mind, to prevent such an incident from reoccurring, I vowed to give my dad a few lessons on the essentials of being an embryologist. At the clinic, we are required to change into scrubs before we enter the lab in order to minimize the entry of dust and microorganisms. Scrubs are commonly worn by doctors, nurses, and medical students when at work. They are designed ...

Quick Tips to Vitrification   Cryopreservation of oocytes or embryos is a critical step in maximizing the efficiency of any IVF cycle. To achieve clinical success with cryopreservation is highly variable from laboratory to laboratory, and may depend on many factors including patient age and stimulation protocol, quality of embryos selected for freezing, developmental stage at freezing, media formulation including type of method used, parameters of cooling and warming.  All through our time in and outside of the laboratory, during discussions, we have heard vitrification is so difficult. Believe us, vitrification, is not difficult. Having said this, yes, we agree that there are certain critical steps you need to focus on and keep in mind and the rest just follows through. Principle: Vitrification can be defined as an extreme elevation in viscosity, i.e. solidification of solutions without ice crystal formation at low temperature. This phenomenon can be induced by either ap...

  Rishina Bansal/Navin Desai Introduction As known Assisted reproductive technology (ART) comprises of intra-uterine insemination (IUI), conventional In-vitro fertilization (IVF) and intra-cytoplasmic sperm injection (ICSI). Though currently, when we talk about an IVF cycle, we are largely referring to conventional IVF or ICSI. The decision of applying which process would depend upon what information we have regarding the couple based on couple history, their current examination report like semen analysis and ovarian scan. In general, every IVF lab should be governed by parameters known as key performance indicators (KPIs) or sometimes referred to as performance indicators (PIs) which are important for the systematic monitoring of the laboratory. Basis: As embryologists, we term the OPU day as Day 0 and we culture the embryos thus formed maximum to Day 5 sometimes to Day 6, thus a typical embryology cycle spread across Day0 – Day5/6. However, the preparation for the cycle starts a...