IMSI seems very expensive

[thislittlebird]

Hi, did any of you have ICSI with IMSI as part of your ivf treatment and if so, do you remember how much the IMSI cost? Our clinic sent us a price and it seems very expensive and I'm not sure we can justify it if it's over £1800 per round so thought I'd ask if if anyone had experience with it, and if so was it worth it?

Hi, can’t answer your question I’m afraid but I’ve just started looking into IMSI. As I understand it IMSI is ICSI with a fancier microscope so I’d expect IMSI to be a few hundred pounds more expensive than ICSI. I’ve paid £1100ish for ICSI at a couple of clinics so while £1800 sounds a bit excessive, it’s the right kind of order of magnitude, particularly if your clinic charge nearer £1500 for ICSI. Unless of course you mean they want to charge you £1800 for IMSI on top of the ICSI fee?! That would definitely seem extortionate! Can I ask why they are recommending IMSI - have you had poor fertilisation with ICSI?

@4F99S1 yes, seems it is on top! I would love the full round to be £1800! I'm very confused by why it's so expensive. The ICSI is £3950 and we'd been planning on getting and Access package for two rounds. But suddenly we've got just under £2-4k in additional IMSI costs to consider. I thought it was an error but having checked their price list I'm not sure it is.

We had ok fertilisation and poor implantation. We got 9 mature, fertilised eggs out of 15 collected in total and we made 4 embryos from those 9. One didn't survive the thaw though so technically 3, and they were good embryos (4AA, 4AB, 4BB, 5AC).

I think this clinic recommends it as standard, I'm so confused by why it costs so much though.

Crumbs, that does seem expensive! To clarify, when I said £1100 for ICSI, that was on top of IVF. I’m no expert but those numbers and grades sound decent so I would definitely push your clinic to justify why they think it’s right for you. You probably know this but it’s rated red on the HFEA add-ons list. For the extra IMSI cost, you could just about fund another round of ICSI. I suppose you just have to decide which is a better investment and gives you the best chance of success overall. Good luck.

@4F99S1 ohhhhh you know what, I think you might have cracked it for me. Looking back at the email it says

ivf 3950
imsi 1855

Usually it would be the icsi figure so I guess it’s instead of the icsi not on top of!

Yeah the red rating bothers me tbh. I’m going to ask them for stats for it because of the red rating.

It’s instead of the ICSI fee. You don’t do IMSI on top of ICSI. It refers to the magnification technique. I got much better embryos using IMSI than ICSI but also changed protocol etc so I don’t know if it was down to the chance of technique or something else. I didn’t mind the red rating as it’s non invasive and just a different way of selecting the sperm. I would only be concerned about a red rating if there was a chance of harm to the embryo

@Nodyourhead yeah, I realised after they had given me the ivf fee and not the icsi fee. Good to know yours were improved, was it a significant improvement? I think we will go with it now I realise it’s only a few hundred pounds and not what I originally thought.