In vitro Fertilization (IVF)

 

IVF can be used in different situations:

  • With patients with a tubarian factor that difficults the egg and the sperm finding each other in the Fallopian tubes.
  • If there is a severe male factor and the quality of the sperm is not good enough for an IUI.
  • With patients that have already done several Artificial Inseminations without success.
  • With older women who want to maximize the chances of success.
  • In all cases, the partner’s or donor sperm can be used.

 

 

How does the treatment work?

Study and analysis of your medical profile. Gynaecological exploration with an ultrasound. Hormonal analysis, if required. Seminogram, wash and selection of the sperm to validate its quality.

You will inject yourself with hormones for 15 days to help grow 1 follicule that will contain 1 egg.

Once most of your follicles have grown correctly, we will perfom the retrieval to aspirate them before they naturally ovulate and end up in the Fallopian tube.The retrieval is done in our operating room under sedation. You can leave the clinic on your own 2 hours later. Meanwhile, your eggs will be washed in our laboratory and prepared for fertilization.

Once the eggs are ready, your partner will leave a sperm sample which will be washed to obtain the best spermatozoa. You can also use donor sperm (if you are a single woman, lesbian or in a heterosexual couple with a very severe male infertility factor). We will inject one spermatozoa into each egg using the ICSI technique. You will be able to see how we do it live via a camera attached to the microscope.

Having injected one spermatozoa into each egg, we will put them in a nutrient-rich mediumand leave them in an incubator simulating the conditions naturally found inside the womb. This incubator has a camera that allows us to take a photo of the egg every 5 minutes so we can see the division of the eggs, that are now embryos, without disturbing the culture conditions.

We can leave the embryos in the incubator for up to 5 days, until they reach the blastocyte stage, which is when they have the highest reproductive potential. That will depend on each patient, especially on the number of embryos obtained. If there are not a lot of embryos we can also cultivate them for 2 or 3 days.

Once we have cultivated the embryos, we must decide, case by case, if we transfer the best ones to the patient or if we freeze them all for later transfer. It is known that some patients have better results if they do the embryo transfer later, as the ovarian stimulation can negativally affect the endometrium, and therefore, the embryo implantation can be also affected. Freezing of your embryos will be at no extra cost to you.

Whether with fresh or frozen embryos, the transfer is the placement of the embryos inside your womb. We do it in our operating theatre, without sedation, and you can leave the clinic on your own 30 minutes later. Legally speaking, we can transfer up to 3 embryos but, case per case, we will determine the best option to obtain the best results but avoiding twin pregnancies. After the transfer, we will give you a video of the photos taken of your embryo while it was in the Time-Lapse incubator. If the treatment works and you get pregnant, this will be the first video of your future baby.

The remaining good quality embryos will be frozen for future use. The freezing process has no extra cost for you. We will keep them for two years for free, and after this period, an annual fee will be charged.

What makes FIV Obradors different?

  • Embryo culture D+5 (blastocyst stage).Whenever possible, cultivating embryos up to Day + 5 produces a better selection to increase the chances of success. There is no extra cost to the patient.
     
  • Uninterrupted embryo culture. Using state-of-the-art incubators with an integrated Time-Lapse system at no extra cost to the patient. These incubators allow the development of the embryos to be monitored without removing them from the incubator, thanks to the photographs taken by a small camera incorporated in it. This enables the development of the embryo to be maximized and, furthermore, for us to make a film of the first days of life of the embryo, which the patient will receive at no extra cost.
     
  • Automatic identification system of the biological samples (sperm, eggs and embryos)(IVFWitness).This system uses radio frequency micro-chips that avoid samples from different patients being mixedup and, therefore, it eliminates the risk of fatal human errors. It is included in all treatments. This technology is not mandatory in Catalonia and can only be found in three other IVF clinics in the country.
     
  • Exhaustive selection of sperm donors (if applicable). We have an extremely exhaustive donor selection process which chooses healthy donors who are free of the 3.200 most important recessive genetic diseases.