Single strip harvesting removes the donor tissue as a single strip


Harvesting Your Hair

There are five common methods of harvesting donor grafts, but only two methods — single strip harvesting and follicular unit extraction (FUE) — are used today.

Single strip harvesting

Single strip harvesting removes the donor tissue as a single strip. The strip of scalp is then divided into smaller sections using a dissecting stereo-microscope; it allows total visual control over the procedure and avoids the unnecessary cutting of hair follicles. (We explain stereo-microscope dissection in the earlier section, “Follicular unit transplantation.”) The stereo-microscope keeps potential damage to follicles to an absolute minimum, and doctors can preserve the intact naturally occurring follicular units.

The great advantage of this method is that the tissue is removed from the scalp with minimal blind cutting because of the use of stereo-microscopic dissection.

Advantages of strip harvesting under microscopic control is that there’s a very high hair yield with an experienced team, and the scar usually is detectable only if you cut your hair to a military buzz cut. Other than the scar and a slightly painful recovery period of a day or two, the strip harvesting procedure is more cost-effective and more efficient from a time perspective. Most importantly, the yield of hair is consistently superior to harvesting without the benefits of a high powered microscope.

The FUE technique can also produce superior hair yields, especially with new technology just being developed. The problem with FUE is that it is very taxing on the surgeon doing the procedure and requires intense concentration for prolonged periods of time to perform the surgery. The surgeon’s fatigue becomes a factor when this technique is extended to more than 1000 grafts.

Robotic hair transplantation, presently on the horizon, will use the FUE harvesting technique as its mainstay for harvesting. Robots will not fatigue as humans do when harvesting follicular units and because of this, robot assisted harvesting promises to produce a technology that will be far superior to hair transplantation done by hand.

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Note: This article was sent to us by: Lionel Venera at 06192010

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