Introduced in 1992, intracytoplasmic sperm injection (ICSI) was — and continues to be — embraced as a breakthrough in treating male fertility problems. About 24,000 ICSI babies are born each year in the United States.

Is ICSI for you?

If you have a low sperm count, low sperm motility or ability to swim, a damaged or missing vas deferens which are the tubes that carry seminal fluid from the testes to the penis, or if you've had an irreversible vasectomy, ICSI can help you impregnate your partner.

Treatment: What to expect

As with in vitro fertilization (IVF) treatment, your partner will receive injections of a fertility drug to stimulate her ovaries to develop several mature eggs for fertilization. She normally releases only one egg a month.

Once her eggs are mature, you'll each have separate procedures. Your doctor will give your partner an anesthetic and remove her eggs from her ovaries by inserting a needle through her vaginal wall. The doctor may use an ultrasound to locate the eggs.

You'll provide a sperm sample. If there isn't enough sperm in your ejaculate, your doctor will remove some from the passages that carry the sperm or from your testicle with a needle. If this doesn't work, your doctor will take a biopsy of your testicular tissue, which may include sperm. Usually these procedures are done under local anesthesia and the recovery isn't painful. It's also possible for the sperm to be retrieved in advance and frozen until the eggs are ready for fertilization.

Next, your doctor will inject your sperm, one at a time, directly into each of your partner's eggs. In traditional IVF, the sperm are placed close to the egg and must successfully enter for conception to occur.

Two to five days later, each of the fertilized eggs will be a ball of cells called an embryo. Your doctor will insert two to four embryos into your partner's uterus using a thin catheter. (Extra embryos, if there are any, may be frozen in case this cycle doesn't succeed.) If the procedure succeeds, an embryo will implant in your partner's uterine wall and grow into a baby. In a little more than a third of ICSI pregnancies, more than one embryo implants itself and women give birth to multiples.)

Your partner can take a pregnancy test about two weeks after the embryos are placed in her uterus.