Abstract
The aim of this study was to recover spermatozoa easily from fresh or frozen-thawed testicular sperm extraction (TESE) samples. We simply minced and washed the TESE samples in medium. Spermatozoa were recovered and washed in the bottom of a PVP droplet with an injection pipette and injected into oocytes. In all cycles 100% of spermatozoa (motile and/or immotile) could be recovered. Injected oocytes were fertilized (100% per cycle and in 41.9% of oocytes) and fertilized oocytes were cleaved (100% per cycle; 38.5% of injected oocytes; 91.8% of fertilized oocytes) after ICSI with fresh or frozen-thawed TESE spermatozoa. The rates of progression to the embryo stage (2-8 cell) and blastocyst formation and their quality were similar in both the fresh sample group and the frozen-thawed sample group. Both of embryo transfer (73.5%) and embryo-blastocyst transfer (26.5%) were performed successfully. Thirty-four cycles of ICSI with testicular spermatozoa resulted in 23.5% pregnancy rates (fresh sample group, 22.2%; frozen-thawed sample group, 24%) with both embryo transfer (8%) and embryo-blastocyst transfer (66.7%). This new sperm preparation method is very simple, easy, effective and rapid for recovering spermatozoa from TESE samples for ICSI.
