For years Debra Walton had dreamed of becoming a mum.

But it wasn’t until she and her husband, Simon, discovered a pioneering IVF procedure which captures images from the first moment of conception, improving couples’ chances of becoming pregnant, that their dream finally became a reality.

Their hopes of a natural conception were dashed when, having fallen pregnant straight away, Debra miscarried.

She later discovered she had a blood clotting problem which, she learned, meant her embryos didn’t embed properly.

By then the couple had already spent more than £10,000 on failed fertility attempts – they didn’t qualify for free treatment as Simon has a daughter, Beth, from a previous relationship.

Their breakthrough came when they discovered the Embryoscope, manufactured by the Danish company, Unisense, at CARE Fertility in Manchester.

The machine improves a couple’s chances of becoming pregnant as the eggs and sperm are contained within the machine with no disturbance. An integral camera also captures time lapsing imaging so it can monitor and store images from the first moment of conception. From the information linked to a computer, the embryologist can play back the images and examine every detail of growth, enabling the selection of the most viable embryo for transfer to the patient.

“It sounded like some miracle machine and it sounded like the next thing to try,” says Debra.

Due to its success, EmbryoScope machines have since been installed in clinics in London, Sheffield, Nottingham, Northampton and Dublin.

While undergoing tests at the clinic, Debra learned about the blood clotting problem which was rectified with an injection given during her fertility treatment.

On December 8, 2012 – two weeks after treatment – Debra recalls the moment she officially found out she was pregnant but she admits she had a suspicion before she learned the result because she had been suffering with sickness.

“I felt as sick as a dog and everybody kept saying it’s going to be twins,” she says.

Twins run in Debra’s family. Her maternal grandmother had two sets of twins and Debra was a twin but, sadly, her twin died before birth. She also has other family members with twins.

“I just felt it had to be twins,” she says.

And it was, as the couple discovered, when they went for the first scan two days after Christmas 2012. “I couldn’t describe how happy I was feeling. I think I cried the whole way through the scan,” recalls Debra.

“I was over the moon, it meant the world to me. It was something we had waited for for eight years and finding it had happened I couldn’t believe it.

“Everything we had strived towards, in that one scan our dreams had come true.”

Debra had a relatively trouble-free pregnancy apart from pre-eclampsia towards the end, prompting the early delivery of her sons Ryder and Freddie on July 18, 2013.

This Mother’s Day will be extra special for Debra, as it’s the first one she will have with the twin babies.

Having spent more than £20,000 in total on fertility treatment over the years, the couple say it has been worth it and, for Debra, all her birthdays and Christmases came at once as the boys were born two days after her birthday.

“It feels like I have finally got my own family. It feels very special and I feel very blessed,” says Debra.

Adds Simon: “It is just amazing, unbelievable. We half expected two because twins run in Debra’s family, but it was still a shock!”

Alison Campbell, head of Embryology, explains that CARE Fertility was the first in the UK to introduce time-lapse imaging for monitoring embryos for IVF patients in 2011.

“We introduced the EmbryoScope time-lapse monitoring system in all of our clinics as we saw the potential benefits of growing IVF embryos in an uninterrupted way – standard methods require embryos to be removed from incubators to be examined once each day – and of being able to watch them develop using time lapse. This was sure to give us additional information to help us make the crucial decision as to which of their embryos would give our patients their best chance.

“We were right to do this, as over the last two years, we have developed CAREmaps which allows us to more accurately select the most viable embryos for our patients and give them the very best chance of a baby,” explains Alison.

CAREmaps is based on the company’s own research and relates the specific patterns of embryo development to viability. Most patients have several embryos developing during an IVF treatment cycle and CAREmaps allows their embryologists to select the one most likely to be successful.

Says Alison: “The embryologists and wider team at CARE Fertility are very excited by this technology and proud of what we have achieved by using it in a very rigorous and specific way. It is the way that we use the equipment alongside our specific embryo selection models (CAREmaps) that gives our patients significant uplifts in pregnancy chances.

For more information visit carefertility.com.