Avenues Cosmetic Surgery

Shyamal Cross Road, Ahmedabad, Gujarat

Strip harvesting is the most common technique for removing hair and follicles from a donor site. The surgeon harvests a strip of skin from the posterior scalp, in an area of good hair growth. A single-, double-, or triple-bladed scalpel is used to remove strips of hair-bearing tissue from the donor site. Each incision is planned so that intact hair follicles are removed. The excised strip is about 1–1.5 x 15–30 cm in size. While closing the resulting wound, assistants begin to dissect individual follicular unit grafts, which are small, naturally formed groupings of hair follicles, from the strip. Working with binocular Stereo-microscopes, they carefully remove excess fibrous and fatty tissue while trying to avoid damage to the follicular cells that will be used for grafting.

With Follicular Unit Extraction or FUE harvesting, individual follicular units containing 1 to 4 hairs are removed under local anesthesia; this micro removal typically uses tiny punches of between 0.6mm and 1.0mm in diameter. We use both the USFDA approved SAFE System of Blunt Punches and the sharp punches to extract the follicles. With FUE hair transplantation, a specialized tool with less than or equal to 1mm diameter is used for extracting the hair follicles directly from the scalp. The main advantage of this technique is that follicular units are extracted directly from the scalp rather than in larger groups, which deters the utilization of scalpel and stitching. In the FUE hair transplant procedure the donor area is required to be fully exposed by shaving it down to zero. If the patient however needs up to 1500 grafts, then the donor area does not need to be fully shaved and sufficient harvesting area can be exposed by a marine style hair cut.

If donor hair numbers from the back of the head are insufficient, it is possible to perform Body Hair Transplantation (BHT) on appropriate candidates who have available donor hair on the chest, back, shoulders, torso andor legs. Body Hair Transplant Surgery can only be performed by the FUE harvesting method and, so, requires the skills of an experienced FUE Surgeon. However, there are several factors for a potential BHT candidate to consider prior to surgery. These include understanding the natural difference in textural characteristics between body hair and scalp hair, growth rates, and having realistic expectations about the results of BHT surgery.