SUBMICROSCOPIC MATHEMATICAL EVALUATION OF SPERMATOZOA IN ASSISTED REPRODUCTION .3. PARTIAL ZONA DISSECTION (PZD) (NOTULAE-SEMINOLOGICAE-12)

This paper belongs to a series of application of the Baccetti's et al. (1995) formula to the submicroscopical mathematical examination of th e human spermatozoa used for assisted reproduction. The present experi ment concerns partial zona dissection, a technique requiring a careful evaluation of sperm quality in order to predict the success of the pr ogram. Our results demonstrate that the sperm submicroscopic character s introduced in the formula are clearly correlated with the result of PZD. In fact the two numbers concerning the sperm ultrastructural qual ity (percentage and total number of spermatozoa free from defects in t he ejaculate) obtained in successful and unsuccessful PZD groups, show ed a large difference (P < 0.01). The most important characteristics s eem to be the quality of the acrosomal complex, the condition of the c hromatin and the mitochondrial assembly. All these characteristics are expressed with largely different means in successful and unsuccessful ejaculates (from P < 0.05 to P < 0.01). A comparison with the results previously obtained in ICSI (Strehler et al., 1995) and IVF (Piomboni et al., 1996) shows that sperm quality is significantly more implicat ed in the success of IVF than of PZD or ICSI.