What this card shows
The IVF polyspermy rate - by embryos inseminated card shows what share of inseminated oocytes were fertilized by more than one sperm, month by month. It covers conventional IVF only, where oocytes and sperm are placed together in a dish. Polyspermy cannot happen in ICSI, where a single sperm is injected, which is why there is no ICSI version of this card.
Polyspermy is identified at the Day 1 check by counting pronuclei (PN). A pronucleus is a visible nucleus in the newly fertilized oocyte. Two, 2PN, is normal. Three or more means more than one sperm got in, and the resulting embryo is not viable.
There are three lines:
Polyspermy rate: your monthly rate, counting every oocyte placed in the dish.
Excluding discarded oocytes: the same rate with discarded oocytes left out.
Benchmark: the Vienna Consensus benchmark, below 6%.
Excluding discarded oocytes is the dotted line, shown for contrast. It answers the same question while leaving out any oocyte the lab later discarded.
The two lines together tell you how much of your result rests on oocytes that were discarded afterwards. The headline is the one to read and the one the reference lines apply to, because the Vienna Consensus fixes this denominator at the Day 1 observation, before any disposal decision has been made, and it declines to set benchmarks for measures that depend on what a lab chooses to discard or freeze. The dotted line therefore has no competency or benchmark applied to it.
This is one of the cards where lower is better, so you want your line sitting below the benchmark.
Reading the card
The denominator is all oocytes placed in the IVF dish for the cycle, including any that were later discarded. This is the denominator the Vienna benchmark is defined against, which is why the benchmark is drawn on this version of the card.
Oocytes that were later discarded still count, on both sides of the rate. An abnormally fertilized oocyte is usually discarded soon afterwards, so leaving those out would understate how often polyspermy is happening.
The Benchmark line is a flat reference line from the Vienna Consensus, not a measurement from your lab.
Hover any point to see the exact figure.
Because the rate is normally low, single months can look volatile when the number of inseminated oocytes is small. Read the trend across several months.
There is a companion card, IVF polyspermy rate - by oocytes retrieved, which scores the same numerator against every oocyte collected on the cycle. It always reads lower. Use this version for benchmark comparison.
A sustained rise above the benchmark usually points at insemination concentration: too many motile sperm per oocyte in the dish. It is one of the more directly actionable signals on this tab, since the sperm concentration used at insemination is a lab-controlled variable.
The card lives on the Laboratory performance (Vienna consensus KPIs) dashboard, on the Fertilization Performance tab, and responds to the filters at the top:
Date: change the time window. It scopes by the date of fertilization, and defaults to the past 6 months plus the current month.
Clinic: focus on one or more locations, if your organization has several.
Treatment type, Age at cycle start and BMI: narrow to a subset of cycles.
Where this data comes from
Both halves of this card come from the Culture tab of the patient's Cycle page: the insemination is recorded as a fertilization event, and the Day 1 observation on each oocyte carries the pronuclei grading.
Recording the pronuclei count on every inseminated oocyte, including the abnormal ones, is what makes this rate accurate. An ungraded oocyte counts in the denominator but can never appear in the numerator, so gaps in recording push this rate down rather than up.
Opening this card
In wawa, open Insights from the sidebar, then go to Standard Reports → Laboratory Performance → Laboratory performance (Vienna consensus KPIs). Select the Fertilization Performance tab. The IVF polyspermy rate - by embryos inseminated card is on it.