Services Provided
The Fertility Center of Colorado is a full service fertility and gynecologic center providing routine and advanced gynecologic treatment and surgery too numerous to list. Some of our specialized services are:
- Fertility Evaluation for women and men
- In Vitro Fertilization (see detail)
- Intra-cytoplasmic Sperm Injection (see detail)
- Blastocyst Embryo Transfer
- Single Embryo Transfer
- Sperm and Embryo Cryopreservation
- Semen Analysis
- Preimplantation Genetic Diagnosis
- Donor Egg/Donor Sperm
- Intrauterine Insemination
- Recurrent Pregnancy Loss Issues
- Management & Treatment of PCOS
- Ovulation Induction with oral and injectable medications
- Testicular Sperm Extraction
- Adolescent Gynecology
- Surgery for fibroids and uterine anomalies
- Endometriosis treatment
Infertility Options: Detail
IVF, or In Vitro Fertilization, and Intractyoplasmic Sperm Injection are considered advanced techniques. Advanced reproductive techniques give many couples a chance at pregnancy that they may not otherwise have.
In Vitro Fertilization
In vitro fertilization is a process by which oocytes (eggs) are harvested from the female partner after her ovaries have been stimulated to produce multiple follicles. The oocytes retrieved are then mixed in a dish with the sperm of the male partner.
Any resulting fertilized pre-embryos are cultured for 3 - 5 days under the watchful eye of the embryologist. Embryo growth is carefully documented so the most progressive and best quality embryos can be chosen for transfer.
New developments in embryo culture media allow us to grow embryos in the laboratory for a much longer period of time. This change to day 5 (blastocyst) embryo transfer, more closely replicates the timing that embryos would normally be entering the uterus from the fallopian tubes. This also allows the embryos to be cultured beyond the time of embryonic genome activation (usually occurring at ~8 cells), to the blastocyst stage.
The additional culture time enables the embryologists to observe embryonic development more closely and select those embryos which appear to have the best potential for implantation. By improving embryo selection we are able to reduce the number of embryos transferred, thus significantly reducing the chance of high order multiple pregnancies.
Intracytoplasmic Sperm Injection
ICSI may be useful in treating many etiologies of infertility, including oligozoospermia (few sperm), asthenozoospermia (low motility), or antisperm antibodies. With ICSI, very few sperm are necessary because only a single sperm is injected into each egg's cytoplasm.
In addition, ICSI may be utilized in cases of azoospermia (no sperm) whether due to vasectomy, spinal cord injury, or other reasons. With the help of a Urologist, sperm can be extracted from testicular tissue allowing patients the opportunity to father a child for whom it might otherwise not be possible.
ICSI is a micromanipulation technique involving a single sperm being injected through a fine glass needle directly into the cytoplasm of the egg. This bypasses the barriers which normally permit only one sperm to penetrate the oocyte, however embryo growth and development is not different from embryos fertilized through conventional IVF.