Is pronuclear scoring a really good predictor for ICSI cycles?

Abstract

Background/Aims. Since the assessments of the morphology of oocytes, zygotes and/or embryos are of crucial importance to select the best candidate for pregnancy, many morphological evaluation tools have been proposed. Although embryo scoring, particularly cleavage and blastocyst stages, is more convincing due to successful results, zygote scoring still have a bias as different outcomes. In the current study, we designed a prospective study to test the reliability of zygote scoring by focusing on zygote evaluation techniques and its relation with embryo development and embryo selection for transfer.

Methods. A total of 1215 mature oocytes from 139 couples were evaluated for the study.

Results. There is no correlation between published zygote scoring technique and embryo development.

Conclusions. We conclude that the inconsistency of data obtained from zygote scoring might be caused by the static nature of pronuclear stage embryos and thus pronuclear scoring seems to be unreliable evaluation technique for embryo selection.

Keywords:

• ICSI
• pronuclear scoring
• zygote

Acknowledgements

Authors thanks to Dr. Mesut Akyol for kind help for statistical analysis.