Current Techniques in Hair Transplant

The surgery is done in a day care setting at plastic and cosmetic surgeon’s office or a surgical centre under local anesthesia. Immediately before hair restoration surgery, your surgeon will design a hairline for you and trim the donor hair. The area is cleansed with a special solution. There are two basic tecniques of harvesting the donor hair.

1. The strip method
2. Follicular extraction method

In the strip method, a patch of skin approx. 25 X 2 cm containing hair and hair follicles is removed from the back of your head. In the FUT (follicular unit transplant) variation, this strip is then cut using microscopes, into follicular hair units containing one to three hair. The skin edges of donor area are stretched and stiched together.

In the anvanced FUE (Follicular Unit Extraction) method, the hair grafts are harvested using micro punches from the scalp. These punches are usuall 1mm or small and take out only hair. Stiching is not required and wound healing is relatively faster. This is a newer and more expensive method.

These isolated follicles are then used for recreation of hair line. Both methods have their pros and cons which I have discussed elsewhere.Older methods of mini(5-7hair) and micro (3-4 hair) are not practiced any more (at least at good centres), since they give unnatural and pluggy appearence.

 The recipient site is similarly treated in both the techniques. Usually fine needles or micro blades are used to create slits in which these grafts are placed. The donor grafts are carefully placed in a pattern that matches the direction of the original hair. The hair grafts are placed in such a way as to achieve adequate density while allowing each graft to receive an adequate blood supply during the healing process.