When you are going through the physical and emotional demands of IVF, the last thing you want to hear is that the eggs were retrieved but failed to fertilize in the lab.
In standard IVF, we place thousands of sperm in a dish with a single egg and wait for one to break through the egg’s tough outer shell on its own. But if your partner has a low sperm count, or if his sperm are slow or abnormally shaped, they simply might not have the energy or physical capability to penetrate the egg.
Intracytoplasmic Sperm Injection (ICSI) removes that risk. It is an advanced laboratory technique performed during an IVF cycle where we completely bypass the sperm’s need to swim and penetrate. We force the fertilization process to happen.
How Does ICSI Actually Work?
ICSI does not change anything about the medication you take or how your eggs are retrieved. The entire procedure happens behind closed doors in our embryology laboratory.
Instead of leaving fertilization up to chance in a petri dish, our senior embryologist looks at your partner’s washed semen sample under a high-powered microscope. They evaluate the sperm in real-time, looking for the single most perfectly shaped, aggressively moving sperm.
Once they find the absolute best candidate, they pick it up using a microscopic glass needle. They carefully hold your retrieved egg in place and inject that single sperm directly into the center of the egg.
Who Should Use ICSI?
We do not use ICSI for every single IVF patient, but it is an absolute necessity for couples facing specific male factor challenges or previous fertilization failures.
Dr. Lakshmi Priya will strongly recommend adding ICSI to your IVF cycle if you are dealing with:
- Severe Low Sperm Count: If there are not enough sperm in the sample to realistically surround and fertilize the egg in a standard IVF dish.
- Poor Motility (Slow Swimmers): If the sperm are alive but not moving efficiently enough to swim to the egg and break through its outer barrier.
- Poor Morphology (Abnormal Shape): A sperm must have a very specific, aerodynamic oval head to pierce the egg’s shell. If too many sperm are misshapen, natural fertilization will fail.
- Previous IVF Fertilization Failure: If you have done a standard IVF cycle in the past where good eggs and good sperm were placed together but failed to fertilize, we use ICSI in the next cycle to guarantee the sperm gets inside.
- Surgically Retrieved Sperm: If sperm had to be extracted directly from the testicles (such as after a vasectomy or due to blockages), the sperm are often immature and cannot penetrate an egg without ICSI.
- Using Frozen Sperm or Eggs: The freezing and thawing process can sometimes harden the outer shell of an egg or slightly reduce the swimming power of sperm. ICSI ensures they connect.
Does ICSI Change the Patient Experience?
For you and your partner, an IVF cycle with ICSI looks and feels exactly the same as a standard IVF cycle. You will still undergo the 10 to 12 days of stimulation injections, and you will still have a standard, painless egg retrieval under light anesthesia. Your partner will still provide a standard sample on the morning of the retrieval.
The only difference is the precision work happening in the laboratory that afternoon to give you the highest possible number of fertilized embryos.
Stop Leaving Fertilization to Chance
If male infertility is standing in the way of your family, we have the technology to bypass it completely.
Book your appointment online and upload your partner’s recent semen analysis for a faster, more accurate evaluation.
