Pictures of IVF und ICSI

Ultrasound-guided transvaginal egg collection in the woman under ultra-short anaesthesia.

Conventional IVF (left) and microinjection (ICSI, right).

Ultrasound-guided embryo transfer.

Pictures from the IVF laboratory

The following pictures about the first moments of human life possess an unadorned aesthetics that hardly anyone can escape.

The human germ cells (gametes): a mature egg on the upper left which has been aspirated from the ovary (the circled polar body indicates that the egg is mature), on the right the sperm cells after washing. Here eggs and sperm are incubated together in culture media overnight in the context of conventional IVF.

On the next morning, the biologist can check what happened overnight: on the upper left a fertilised egg (zygote) with two pronuclei (circled). The pronuclei contain the female and male genetic material and will fusion during the next few hours (syngamy). The arrangement of the pronuclei and the pattern of the small clots inside them (nucleoli) recently have been determined to allow a statement about implantation potential (criteria of Smith, Scott and Tesarik). On the upper left an embryo is seen at the two cell stage on the morning of day two.

On the upper left an «ideal» embryo at the four cell stage on day two. In this stage - or in the eight-cell stage on day three - the embryo will be transferred back into the woman's womb (embryo transfer).