Every embryo, every day, on one record

The session is the lab's summary of one retrieval

Every oocyte retrieval opens a piece of laboratory work: a cohort of oocytes, an insemination decision, and a fertilisation check the following morning. FertiliCore models that as an embryology session tied to the OPU and the treatment cycle, so the maturity breakdown and the fertilisation outcome stay attached to the retrieval that produced them rather than being reconstructed later from embryo rows. The session record captures the insemination method and sperm source, the MII, MI, GV and degenerate counts, and the split between normally fertilised 2PN oocytes and abnormal fertilisation. Each embryo created that day is attached to its session when the embryo record is created, which is what makes fertilisation rate a derived figure instead of a hand-tallied one.

The embryo record is the identity card

An embryo accumulates facts over a week of culture and often over years of storage, and those facts have to survive staff changes and cycle boundaries. The embryo record holds the durable summary: its sequence number within the session, the maturity of the oocyte it came from, the sperm source and the morphology and motility of the sperm used, the final grade and the day that grade was assigned, the PGT result once genetics returns it, the freeze day and method, thaw and transfer dates, and the final disposition. The embryology screens list embryos by patient with oocyte maturation, final grade, final day and disposition visible without opening a record, and the embryo state is tracked separately from soft deletion — available, transferred, frozen, biopsied or discarded.

• Oocyte maturation recorded as MII, MI, GV or degenerate
• Sperm source: partner, donor, TESE, PESA or frozen
• Disposition: transferred, frozen, discarded, biopsy, donated or arrested
• PGT result written back from the genetics domain

Daily observation is where grading actually happens

Morphology assessment is a repeated observation, not a single verdict, and a record that only stores the final grade throws away the developmental history that explains it. The daily observation grid holds one row per embryo per culture day and is embedded directly in the embryo form and detail view, with fixed rows for days 2 through 6 and columns for cell number, pronuclei, fragmentation percentage, symmetry, morphology grade, expansion, ICM, trophectoderm and the action taken. The morphology dropdown changes catalogue with the day, so a day-3 row offers day-3 cleavage grades and a day-4 row offers morula-stage descriptors. The schema stores days 0 to 7, so day-0 insemination and day-1 fertilisation-check rows can be held against the embryo even though the grid surfaces days 2 to 6.

Gardner grading, kept structured

Blastocyst grading is three independent judgements — degree of expansion, inner cell mass quality, trophectoderm quality — and clinics that store them as a single free-text string lose the ability to query any one of them. FertiliCore keeps them as three fields on the observation row: expansion 1 to 6, ICM A to C, trophectoderm A to C. There is deliberately no blastocyst pick-list; the Gardner system is captured structurally instead. The same row carries an AI morphokinetic score field, which is what a time-lapse incubator export populates when the device connector is configured.

Biopsy and the hand-off to genetics

Three biopsy techniques are modelled, matching what laboratories have actually done over the past two decades. Blastomere biopsy records the culture day, cells removed and cells sent. Polar body biopsy records whether PB1, PB2 or both were taken. Trophectoderm biopsy — the technique behind current PGT-A and PGT-M work — records the day, the cell count, the tube identifier used for chain of custody, whether the sample has been shipped, and which genetic centre received it. These are held in the data model and served through the API rather than through a dedicated biopsy screen today; the resulting PGT verdict returns to the embryo record as its PGT result.

Transfer, cancellation and warming

Transfer is the event a cycle turns on, and the details that matter for later audit are procedural: who transferred, on what day of development, through which catheter, into what endometrium. The embryo transfer screen records the date and time, the physician and loading embryologist, the number of embryos and the transfer day, catheter type, endometrial thickness in millimetres, procedural difficulty and, when the transfer did not proceed, a coded cancellation reason from a seeded list. Which specific embryos were placed — number, grade, day, and whether each was frozen-thawed — is modelled as per-embryo transfer lines held against the transfer. Embryo thaw sessions are recorded on their own screen with embryos warmed, survived and damaged and the warming protocol used, which is what makes thaw survival rate reportable.

• Coded ET cancellation reasons, including freeze-all and PGT pending
• Endometrial thickness and transfer difficulty on every procedure
• Thaw sessions with survived and damaged counts