All about a follicular unit extraction/FUE hair transplant

LONDON - Dec. 28, 2013 - PRLog -- There are two methods of hair transplant. One is the Follicular Unit Transplant that takes the traditional strip harvesting technique while the other is Follicular Unit Extraction that is a more innovative hair transplant procedure that reaches for a less invasive method.

Hair restoration (http://www.hairtransplantclinic.org.uk) in London is a consistently common surgery that is often sought after by commoners. However, the FUE technique happens to be a whopping hair restoration cost as the main jinx than the FUT technique. There is no cutting of the scalp skin involved in this procedure however; there will be some amount of surgical wounding and scarring.

The FUE hair transplant technique is done by making pinprick incisions with specialized punches and forceps as the major instruments. These instruments are used to pinch and pluck the hair follicles off a permanent donor zone. The difference between FUT and FUE is this that the way of harvesting the donor hair. Otherwise, the way the grafts are dissected and planted in the recipient area is all same or similar.

 The Procedure of FUE hair transplant

The donor area is cropped short and a saline solution mixed with local anaesthetics is injected to the donor area. Once the anaesthetic has numbed and prepared the donor area for the surgery a 0.8 to 1.4mm micro-punch that look much like tweezers with expanded needles the specialized tool is used to pluck the hair follicles individually.

Sometimes, when a bigger recipient site is to be covered via FUE, the hair follicles are much prone to damage while extraction via normal punches, especially in case of body hair because the body hair happens to be finer than scalp hair. Getting over with these obstacles the technique of expanding needle is devised which makes graft extraction much more easily and save maximum grafts to be plucked off the scalp without transaction.

Manual FUE hair transplant is performed under local anaesthesia making pin prick holes circled around each of the hair follicular units with the help of a purposively designed micro-punch and loosening the hair graft from the root of hair and extracting it with forceps. The main credential in manual FUE is the surgeon’s skills and artistry of hands and the surgeon lays all his stress to keep the extracted follicles intact and save from damages from the sharp instruments. Once extracted the intact grafts are kept in a cold storage under preservative saline solutions until the recipient site is prepared.

Motorised FUE hair transplant is the same process but combining a number of more advanced powered instruments that provide the surgeon even precision for graft extraction. The expanding needle technique offers a customary extraction of body hair possible with the FUE where surgeons can extract even body hair like beard, arms and legs under a magnified vision and hypodermic needles to maximize donor hair availability.

Recipient site preparation is done by using hypodermic needles to make pin prick holes to implant the follicular grafts. The surgeon creates the recipient in such a pattern that will look dense and thick.

Graft Dissection and transplantation is done through a determination following the pattern made by the surgeon. The grafts are separated according to their quality and number of hairs they contain with the maximum being 6 hairs and minimum 1 hair. The bigger grafts are typically placed in the vertex area for a denser look and the minimum hair grafts are placed in the frontal.