IMSI

A new break through in treating Male infertility

Setting a new precedent for the rest of the country, recently Lilavati Hospital IVF Centre Mumbai has installed a new microscope machine that will allow infertility specialists to pick the best quality sperm while carrying out the specialized test-tube baby procedure of ICSI.

Intra-Cytoplasmic Morphologically Selected Sperm Injection (IMSI)
helps magnify the image of the sperm 7,200 times, thereby allowing doctors to pick the best looking healthier sperms.

The machine
is an advanced version of the earlier technique of Intracytoplasmic Sperm Injection (ICSI), having the magnification capacity of 16 times higher than ICSI.

In ICSI technique, an egg is held and injected with a husband sperm, with the help of a machine called micromanipulator. If the husband has no sperms, then sperms are obtained by doing a testicular biopsy. The fertilization occurs outside the woman’s body. The baby/embryo is created outside the body of the mother and then placed inside the mother’s womb.

The IMSI method was first developed in 2004 by a team led by Benjamin Bartoov, of Barilan University in Israel, who used IMSI to select those sperms with a shape and size that indicated good geneticquality. The pregnancy rate in patients jumped from 30 % to 66 %.

IMSI helps improve the success rate among men with the worst prognosis and is said to be more beneficial than ICSI in patients with previous two IVF or ICSI failures. It is also useful in couples with unexplained infertility. It has been shown that IMSI resulted in better egg fertilization rates, better quality embryos, better rate of blastocyst formation and therefore better pregnancy rates.

Since IMSI has been introduced in our hospital many pregnancies, have been achieved. Recently one patient who had severe male factor infertility and who had failed to fertilize her eggs in previous two attempts of ICSI, they not only achieved fertilization with IMSI but also achieved pregnancy.