Blastocyst culture depends on quality of embryos on day 3, not quantity

Study objective: Our aim was to find whether the number really matters and if good blastocysts can be developed even with less numbers on day 3 provided quality is good. Design: A retrospective analysis of all fresh ICSI cycles with a maximum of 6 embryos on day 3, excluding Donor Oocyte, donor embryo and frozen embryo cycles was done. Setting: A Tertiary Infertility Centre in the metro city Chennai, India. Materials and methods: A total number of 84 ICSI cycles with 320 embryos were categorized into six groups based on the day 3 embryo numbers in each cohort. Main outcome measure: ANOVA was used to compare the mean blastocyst formation between these groups and was statistically significant (P = 0.000). Diagnostic Efficacy for these groups was tested using F1 Score and Mathew's Correlation Coefficient. Conclusion: Incidence of blast formation rate for the Case group with embryos (1-3) was observed to be 91.5% and 83.2% for the Control group with embryos (> 3) and was significant with an overall pregnancy rate 40.5%. Blastocyst culture is possible even with less numbers on day 3 if the quality of embryos is good. (C) 2015 The Authors. Production and hosting by Elsevier B.V. on behalf of Middle East Fertility Society. This is an open access article under the CC BY-NC-ND license