Many couples with an unfulfilled desire to have children make use of various artificial insemination options. One of the reproductive medicine procedures on offer is Intracytoplasmic Morphologically Selected Sperm Injection, or IMSI for short. Here, the man's sperm are examined under a special microscope at high magnification before artificial insemination. The aim is to use the best quality sperm for the treatment.
You can find more information and specialists here.
The abbreviation IMSI stands for Intracytoplasmic Morphologically Selected Sperm Injection, which is a further development of ICSI (Intracytoplasmic Sperm Injection).
In both methods, specialists inject a sperm outside the organism directly into the egg. If fertilization is successful, doctors cultivate the egg to a certain embryonic stage. They then implant it back into the woman. This increases the chances of pregnancy.
A characteristic feature of the IMSI method is that experts select the sperm for fertilization in advance.
To understand how IMSI works, you should know how the underlying ICSI works:
Artificial fertilization of an egg cell © Tatiana Shepeleva /AdobeStock
The advantage of IMSI is that experts examine and analyze the sperm in detail beforehand. They examine the sperm at 1600 to 16,000 times magnification.
With the ICSI method, on the other hand, the magnification is only 200-400 times. A special microscope with separate software is used to select the sperm for the IMSI method.
The microscope displays the sperm, the software evaluates the displayed results and carries out a selection. The enormous magnification is possible thanks to differential interference contrast (DIC). The IMSI method is very complex and time-consuming and requires a high-end microscope.
This enables experts to select sperm thatdo not showany abnormalities in terms of shape and structure.
Possible abnormalities are
This means that better quality sperm are available for fertilizing the egg.
The advantages of IMSI:
Patients who have not been successful with the conventional ICSI method may benefit from the IMSI method.
Some studies indicate that IMSI has achieved a significant increase in pregnancy rates. The reason for this is the better sperm.
However, there are also critics of this method, some of whom have major doubts about the study results. The most common criticism is that the poor quality sperm can also be identified using the normal ICSI method.
The use of a microscope to magnify the sperm does not bring the proclaimed advantages. Although experts can detect abnormalities in the "head" of the sperm using IMSI, it is unclearwhether these affect fertility.
Patients who want to become pregnant using the IMSI method can choose from various fertility centers.
It is important to choose a facility with expert and experienced staff. You should check all medical and psychological aspects in advance and consider other methods if necessary. After all, there are many reasons for involuntary childlessness .
Reproductive medicine options
IMSI is a purely private service that is not covered or co-financed by health insurance companies. There is no general answer to how high the costs ultimately are.
As these treatment methods are variants of artificial insemination, they are not entirely uncontroversial.
This is because many people take a very critical view of this intervention in nature. Whether malformations are a consequence of artificial insemination has not yet been clarified.
The Leading Medicine Guide's quality assurance is ensured by the following acceptance prerequisites.
