Male infertility : Breakthrough in treatment

Setting a new precedent for the rest of the country, recently the IVF centre at Fortis La Femme Hospital, GK–2, New Delhi has installed a new microscope machine that will allow infertility specialists to pick the best quality sperm while carrying out the specialised 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, says Dr Hrishikesh Pai, consulting Gynaecologist and infertility specialist. 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 fertilisation 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 says Dr Nandita Palshetkar. According to Dr Hrishikesh Pai, 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 genetic quality. The pregnancy rate in his patients jumped from 30 to 66 per cent. 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 at Fortis La femme, many pregnancies, have been achieved, says Dr Nandita Palshetkar of Fortis. (Courtesy:Delhi Times,18 Dec.2009)