For Patients
Infertility Explained
ART Assisted Reproductive Technology (or Technique), commonly called ART, refers to any infertility treatment that uses advanced technology to combine sperm and eggs outside the body in a laboratory. Most couples go through extensive infertility evaluation before considering ART. Some infertile couples will choose to use lower-technology treatments, such as intrauterine insemination (IUI), before turning to ART. Others find that their chances at getting pregnant are optimal with ART. It's estimated that about one-third of infertile couples in the United States are good candidates for infertility treatment using ART.
Egg (oocyte) donation helps women who have undergone early menopause or whose ovaries respond poorly to fertility medications. Egg donation is an emotionally charged, expensive, and time-intensive experience that offers a realistic and highly successful option for many couples who would otherwise have no way to have a child.
Many ART procedures involve in vitro fertilization, the process in which eggs, retrieved from the ovary, are fertilized in the laboratory with the partner’s sperm (or donor sperm, if necessary). Subsequently, the resulting embryos are transferred into the woman’s uterus. There are four major steps in an IVF cycle:
Intracytoplasmic sperm injection (ICSI) is a microinsemination technique developed to improve the likelihood of fertilization for couples with sperm abnormalities or prior history of fertilization failure with standard IVF.
The freezing of eggs, also called human oocyte cryopreservation, is a rapidly advancing technology of extracting, freezing and storing a woman’s eggs (oocytes). The eggs can later be thawed, fertilized, and transferred to the uterus as embryos months or years later.
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