If You Are Suffering From Thinning Hair, We Have a Robot That Can Help

At Silicon Valley Hair Institute, we do get asked by our patients what FUE means. It stands for Follicular Unit Extraction and is a fancy way of referring to a robotic hair transplant. Of course, we then get asked how a robot works and why we should use one, so let’s take a quick look.

A hair follicle is a tunnel-like structure in the epidermis, which is the outer layer of the skin. The hair starts growing at the bottom of the hair follicle. The root of the hair is made up of protein cells and is fed by blood from nearby blood vessels.

If you have a manual hair transplant, the surgeon will remove a strip of hair from the back of your head, and this strip will then be cut into many different pieces, each containing between one and four hair follicles. These individual hair follicles – or more correctly, follicular units – are then transplanted one by one into the recipient site. This is called an FUE transplant, and you can get one right here in the San Francisco Bay Area.

So far, so good. Unfortunately, when the surgeon removes the strip of hair from your head it will leave a scar which is visible, and that means that you may not wish to wear your hair short for that reason.

Things Are Very Different With An FUE Transplant

However, things are very different when you have an FUE transplant in San Francisco using the ARTAS robot. The robot doesn’t remove a strip of hair, but rather takes tiny follicular units of one to four follicles from parts of the head with hair and transplants them individually into the recipient site. This means that, because the follicular units are so tiny, there is no visible scar left in the spot from where they were harvested.

That is just one benefit of a robotic hair transplant. Another is that the robot will transplant the follicular units exactly beside any existing hair in the recipient site at the same height, angle, and direction, thus giving a very natural look. It does this without, in most cases, damaging any existing hair in the site.

Yet another advantage is that the robot doesn’t get tired. A hair transplant surgeon working manually over several hours is bound to tire, and this will result in some errors. The robot doesn’t make mistakes. It can go on all day, and all night too if you wish.

There are further advantages as well. There is less pain involved, and most patients can go back to work the next day and carry on playing sport or whatever else they do, without any down time.

At Silicon Valley Hair Institute in Foster City, we are one of the few hair transplant centers in the Bay Area that can offer a robotic transplant. If you are considering an FUE transplant in the San Francisco Bay Area, then book a free appointment to discuss it with our Dr Miguel Canales – the man who actually invented the ARTAS robot!!