Who are the best suitable candidates for Blastocyst Culture ?

Multiple Unsuccessful IVF

You can undergo blastocyst culture if you have a history of recurrent unsuccessful IVF. Performing this procedure would help in receiving more information about the development of the embryos. Consequently, it will give support to improve the rate of pregnancy success.

Multiple Healthy Blastocysts

If you have a higher chance of developing more than one healthy blastocyst, you can undergo freezing of extra embryos.

Avoid Possibilities of Multiple Pregnancy

Blastocyst culture also allows avoiding multiple pregnancies. Since this term enables the chances of the single best embryo transfer, it decreases the possibilities of multiple pregnancies.

Embryo Freeze

If you want to undertake a frozen embryo transfer cycle with frozen embryos from earlier cycles

Steps for Blastocyst Culture

The blastocyst culture continues for five to six days.
  • Day 0: Egg Retrieval and fertilization
  • Day 2: The cells divide into two-stage and then from the two-cell stage, it further splits into a four-cell stage.
  • Day 4-5: Now it reaches the early blastocyst stage
  • Day 1: Zygote formation
  • Day 3: It again develops into an eight-cell stage
    Day 3-4: It attains Morula stage
  • Day 5-7: The blastocyst reaches an expanded stage. At this time, the internal cell mass expands into a fetus, and the outer cell layer cultivates the placenta.
Although previous embryo transfer followed by IVF or ICSI was performed on Day 2-3 after egg retrieval, the advanced technology enables to culture embryos till Day 5 or Day 6. On Day 5-6, the embryo reaches its blastocyst stage to expand the scope of determining the best embryo by the embryologist for embryo transfer.

Are there any risk factors ?

As only a few embryos could reach the blastocyst stage, there can be very few or no excess embryos for freezing. With the fewer embryos, only initial transferring could be possible in a fresh cycle. However, a good successful transfer of blastocyst, embryo freezing may not be required anyway.