Special techniques

What is the Embryoscope?

The Embryoscope is an innovative technology that’s currently revolutionizing the field of Embryonic Medicine. It’s an incubator that maintains the necessary physiological conditions required by a living embryo during an in vitro process, with an additional peculiarity: it includes a camera that continuously captures images of the embryonic development. This camera films the beginning of life.

All patients from Institut Marquès who have undergone In Vitro Fertilisation using Embryoscope now have the opportunity to watch this “movie on life” from their own homes with the embryomobile.

By means of a world pioneer system developed by our center, our patients can now watch through the Internet how their embryos evolve before these get transfered.

Thus, they can “enter” our In Vitro Fertilisation laboratory from their homes or any other place and observe their embryos as our embryologists do.

 

What is it used for?

* Investigation. The Embryoscope provides us with very valuable material concerning the actual behavior of an embryo while undergoing its first cellular divisions. It’s modifying the morphological criteria on which we base upon when rating embryos. Thus, it helps us understand several questions that remained unanswered until the moment.

* Clinical applications. This new technology increases pregnancy rates for two main reasons. First, it spares us from having to daily remove the embryos from the incubator and take them to the microscope in order to observe them, saving it from suffering changes in temperature, light, etc. Also, it allows for a better selection of those embryos with top implantation potential. We observe its rate of cellular divisions, cell structure, and how all those aspects that until now would have made us discard an embryo get solved naturally. An embryo’s characteristics can deteriorate in a matter of minutes; nevertheless, the video allows us to see it has only been a timely change and how it has been solved efficiently.

* Show. It allows us to see live what we’ve been forced to imagine for many years. Questions like “What must have happened to the development of this embryo since we last watched it?” can be solved with realities. It’s beautiful that a woman who has required our help to become a mother will be able to show these images to her child.