Together. All the way.

The routine use of follicle flushing during oocyte pick-up varies a lot between clinics. If flushing is used, there are many alternative solutions. At Vitrolife we are constantly working to improve our products and services and one way of doing this is to get a better understanding of user behaviour during certain procedures. We were interested in the use of heparin during flushing and sent a survey to the IVF community. Here is the result.

Oxygen, the very gas that we depend on for life, is largely responsible for our ageing, demise and ultimately our death. Professor David K Gardner considers this paradox in his blog post.

There are many differences between Stockholm, Denver and Lhasa. One of them is the need for different CO₂ settings in the IVF lab, due to different altitudes. In this blog post Dr. Markus Montag gives advice on how to ensure successful embryo culture at high altitude. 

Another ASRM is over with lots of interesting new science presented. As always the programme covered a large variety of topics. In this blog I will highlight some of the studies and sessions which I found of particular interest.

New assessment methods call for new assessment measures. Having a common nomenclature can form the basis for clearer communication of embryo assessment and evaluation. The nomenclature described in this blog post is what we have found to facilitate ease of agreement and understanding between time-lapse users.

A successful IVF treatment is a pregnancy that results in the birth of a healthy child. Many aspects are discussed in order to raise pregnancy rates. An increasingly important parameter to reflect a successful IVF program in today's world of IVF is the time to pregnancy and live birth. In this blog post I will go through some of the critical steps in the IVF procedure and how they can be optimised.

Once again we can look back on the biggest event in the IVF community - the Annual Meeting of the European Society for Human Reproduction and Embryology. More than 10 000 people gathered in Helsinki, Finland to gain new scientific information, meet with colleagues and friends as well as explore the exhibit for new products and technologies. As usual, the scientific program is a mix of invited sessions, free communications, posters and sponsored activities. In this blog post we will make an attempt to summarise our reflections from this year’s ESHRE.

In connection to a recent post on the benefits of consistent annotation we invited readers to take a short survey on the use of annotations in their time-lapse software. Thanks to all of you who answered – here are the results.

Culture media for IVF can go out of specification during transport for different reasons. This may be detrimental to the product, but not always. In this blog post I will explain what happens to the media when it gets too warm or too cold.

The success of an IVF treatment depends on numerous factors. The patients and the causes of their infertility, the hormone stimulation regimen, culture media, quality and maintenance of equipment and skills of staff are all factors that will influence the outcome. One important factor that can have a detrimental impact on the IVF treatment outcome, but is sometimes overlooked, is the quality of the plastic equipment.