The effect of quarter laser assisted hatching of embryos on pregnancy rates in humans after intracytoplasmic sperm injection / Mostafa Mohsen Mohamed Abulsoud ; Supervised Abdelwahab Abu Bakr Elghareeb , Heba Ali Abdelrahman , Amr Sarwat Alahwani

Thesis (M.Sc.) - Cairo University - Faculty of Science - Department of Zoology

Assisted hatching (AH) is a technique originally created to help increase the pregnancy rates after Intra-cytoplasmic sperm Injection procedures (ICSI). A lot of AH techniques emerged including mechanical, chemical and laser AH. However, laser assisted hatching (LAH) was proven to be superior to other techniques due its easy integration in existing injection systems, its safety on the embryos, and the general ease of usage. LAH is hypothesised to enhance the pregnancy rates for patients undergoing ICSI cycles because it was previously found that zona pellucida gets harder and firmer after ICSI, thus the growing embryo fails to hatch, due to zona pellucida hardening, and consequently it never implants itself into the endometrium. Many meta-analyses could not conclude if AH is beneficial due to the mixed results from researches. So, there is still uncertainty. Our study was carried out to evaluate the impact of quarter LAH on the reproductive outcome of ICSI cycles in patients with poor prognosis. Quarter LAH is the process of thinning quarter the circumference of zona pellucida. Controlled2ovarian2stimulation2was done2for the patients,2oocytes were collected2and denudated. ICSI2was done2for those oocytes, fertilization2was checked, and2good quality embryos2were isolated for2the quarter LAH2process before being transferred back2into the uterus2on day three. Chemical2pregnancy and clinical pregnancy rate2were estimated for2both experiment and control2groups and2our study revealed that2quarter LAH could significantly improve both chemical and clinical pregnancy rate of ICSI cycles for patients with poor prognosis

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