Hair Transplant,Cosmetic & Plastic Surgery Clinic

A hair transplant is a surgical procedure in which hair is moved from the back and/or sides of the scalp, where it is permanent (donor area), to areas that are thinning or bald on the front, top, or crown of the scalp (recipient area). Once transplanted, the hair will continue to grow for a personal’s lifetime. At Bernstein Medical we perform the two most effective types of hair restoration procedures, Follicular Unit Transplantation (FUT) and Follicular Unit Extraction (FUE). For the latter, we use new robotic technology.

Follicular Unit Transplantation (FUT) is a hair restoration procedure where naturally-occurring groups of one to four hairs, called follicular units, aretransplanted from the donor area to the recipient area.

In FUT, after the patient’s scalp is numbed, the doctor removes a thin strip of tissue from the back and/or sides of the scalp. The donor strip is then separated into hundreds to thousands of individual follicular units using precise stereo-microscopic dissection techniques. As the follicular unit grafts are being prepared, the doctor makes tiny slits in the scalp (recipient sites), into which the grafts are placed.

If well executed, the use of follicular units will insure that the transplant will look completely natural and be undetectable. Follicular Unit Transplantation was conceived by Dr. Bernstein and first described in the medical literature in his landmark 1995 public.

Follicular Unit Extraction (FUE) is a method of extracting, or harvesting, follicular units one-by-one directly from the scalp. In FUE, an instrument is used to make small, circular incisions in the skin around follicular units, separating them from the surrounding tissue. The follicular unit is then extracted (pulled) directly from the scalp, leaving a small open hole that heals with a small white mark.

This method of donor harvesting is what differentiates the FUE procedure from Follicular Unit Transplantation (FUT), where the donor hair is removed in a long strip that is dissected into individual follicular units using a microscope. The creation of recipient sites and the placing of follicular unit grafts are essentially the same in both FUE and FUT procedures.

The FUE technique was conceived by Dr. Ray Woods in the 1990s in Australia and was introduced into the medical literature by Rassman and Bernstein in 2002. In 2011, Dr. Bernstein began performing FUE using robotic technology.

In Robotic FUE hair transplant procedures, follicular units are isolated using the ARTAS robotic system. The ARTAS system is a computerized, image-guided robot that automates the labor intensive process of extracting hundreds or thousands of grafts in a session. Its advantage over other FUE techniques is due to its precision and consistency in extracting grafts. All FUE procedures at Bernstein Medical are performed using the ARTAS robot.