The time dimension and the future of infertility treatments

Among the increasingly fashionable additions to the spectrum of human ARTs are those aimed at bringing the element of time into the equation of prognosis and treatment strategies for infertility [1]. Distancing from the everyday goings on in the embryology laboratory having to do with scheduling and the bewildering array of “time-sensitive” duties has been the arrival of time-lapse morphokinetics—the real-time analysis of events that have enhanced what we can observe. The confluence of technologies involving advances in embryo culture, imaging, and algorithms designed to extract and objectify behaviors of human embryos from fertilization to the blastocyst stage is allowing practitioners to make educated guesses that influence treatment outcomes. Indeed, a series of papers this month take a close and hard look at some of the promising insights gained from morphokinetic analyses buttressing its ever-expanding utility as ONE metric with which to gauge embryo quality. Of these papers, one stands out—at least in sending a clear message to the ART community. …