Our Operating Room & Recovery Room
Our in-house Operating Room Suite and Recovery Room allow us to provide a more relaxing environment for patients undergoing various procedures such as egg retrievals, tubal anastomosis (tubal reversal), hysteroscopy, laparoscopy, cyst aspiration and cervical dilatation. Our offices are furnished with the same capabilities found in an operating room of any major hospital facility.
Our Laboratory
NCCRM’s on-site laboratory is unique and sets itself apart from other fertility centers in the Raleigh area because it operates continuously with a full-time laboratory director who constantly monitors all aspects of our patients’ treatments. Our embryologists performs all state of the art assisted reproductive procedures, including micromanipulation procedures such as sperm injection (ICSI) and assisted hatching, as well as embryo cryopreservation and pre-implantation genetic diagnosis (PGD).
Our laboratory focus is to combine your eggs and sperm to achieve fertilization, culture the embryos until transfer and to select and transfer the embryos most likely to implant for a pregnancy. If any embryos develop that cannot be transferred back during the cycle, the extra embryos will be cryopreserved for use in a later transfer cycle.
Sperm preparations are done by wash and spin and swim-up, density gradient preparations, or other techniques as needed. Normally sperm are placed with the eggs overnight for fertilization. Frozen donor sperm may be used, or sperm may be obtained from the epididymis or testis in cases of severe male infertility. In these cases, sperm are injected into each ova by the intracytoplasmic injection (ICSI).
After fertilization your embryos are evaluated and graded for quality every 24 hours so the best quality embryos can be transferred at the 8 cell stage, three days after the egg retrieval. If the embryo cannot hatch out of its egg shell (zona pellucida) after transfer, pregnancy will not occur and assisted hatching may help in some cases. At the time of transfer, assisted hatching is done for women over 37 years of age on embryos with thick zonae, or for patients with repeated IVF failure. We use a laser to do assisted hatching.
Cryopreservation is done with a controlled rate freezer or by vitrification. Both are well proven techniques for freezing embryos. Cryopreservation can only be done with good quality embryos. About one out of three of our patients have embryos to freeze.
