Quick question about FUE.

[mahhong]

Hi Guys,

 

I'm going to be considering my first of what I assume will be several hair transplants over the next 5-10 years, probably within the next 1-3 years. From my research it seems the common opinion on a good way forward is to use the Strip method to create the bulk of your HT and then maybe use FUE to get extra donor hair if you need further procedures for density (as FUE seems to offer a little more "finer detail" in terms of extraction, but is not as generally useful for bulk HT - at least that's what I'm getting from my research).

 

Anyway my question is sort of related to FUE and in particular the method of donor hair removal. I'm led to believe that in strip but also in FUE the hair is removed from a donor "section". I can certainly understand why this is the case for strip (to create one clean strip wound across the back and sides of the head that will heal cleanly) but, with FUE, is it potentially possible to remove grafts from "random" sections of the available donor area?

 

To try and explain my point I'll use a very bad diagram! Say you have relatively thick hair with a good density in your donor area; lets say below are the individual follicles:

 

I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I

 

Rather than a surgeon taking say, that whole patch but only from a small area of my entire donor region, is it possible and plausible to FUE in this sort of manner (where () denotes extracted follicle:

 

I (I) I (I) I (I) I (I) I (I) I (I) I (I) I (I) etc.

 

 

In my (probably terrible!) logic it seems that if you were to extract follicles in this manner across a larger area of your donor region (say pretty much the entire region) you could redistribute more hair without losing any quality in your cosmetic appearance across the donor region. Following on from that could you potentially yield more grafts in this manner?

 

Just to clarify I don't mean literally taking a hair follicle, leaving the next one, taking the next one and so on; I know that sort of 1:1 ratio would be impossible. But say a 1:5 or 1:9 ration, for example.

 

I'm sure there are major problems in my logic but I just wanted to throw the question out and see what people said. Would scarring and scalp laxity prove a limiting factor in this? At the moment I can't see how it would as surely removing individual FUs would result in that area scarring over with a tiny scar? As a result theoretically your donor region would be peppered in tiny scars but with no scar being big enough to make an overall cosmetic difference.

 

Anyway just wanted to see if this is possible, ridiculous, plausible, ethical!? I just imagined that once you'd exhausted your donor region by strip (which is obviously massively dependent on scalp laxity) then a doctor could almost perform FUE strictly from a cosmetic standpoint; if you have thick hair and good density you could remove hair follicles on a ration basis across the whole of the donor region without compromising the aesthetic quality of that region (after all it'd just be like hairs falling off your scalp except in a controlled manner that is careful to maximise FUE with cosmetic balance).

 

Look forward to your thought!

[mattj]

Mahhong, I think you've just described the usual FUE harvesting technique. If you take a look at FUE cases where the post-op donor area is shown, you'll see that grafts are taken evenly from the full 'safe' zone throughout the back and much of the sides of the head.

 

Also, strip followed by FUE is the logical route for maximizing grafts available to an individual.