Hair clusters vs follicular groups
My goal would be to find a procedure that transplants clusters of hairs together, with a good amount of surrounding tissue, as some evidence is showing survival rates of those hairs fair much better when compared to single hairs that have been separated from the unit and transplanted. They specify that as 6-12mm.
Punch sizes of between 6-12 mm is way to big for FUE. The typical FUE uses 0.9 -1.0mm sized punches. All punch sizes even greater than 6mm were tried in the early days of hair transplantation in the late 1950 and 1960s. The oxygen never got to the hairs inside of the graft so that the only growth was on the rim of the graft, a donut shape hair pattern of growth. Then after I introduced FUE to both the ISHRS and published in a prominent journal, a demand for FUE appeared in the marketplace. The problem was that there were few good tools that everyone would standardize upon. Now there are a lot of different tools including dull punches, hybrid punches and round sharp[ circular punches are can remove grafts with a diameter as small as 0.8mm. Each doctor has their preferences. To get grafts with good tissue around them 100% of the time, if you don’t believe in FUE, you should consider a Strip surgery as the graft and its surrounding tissue and capsule are always harvested correctly. The FUE is a blind procedure depending upon unique surgical skills, good eyesight, and mechanical factors that allow the punch to successfully harvest the grafts, The grafts are 100% visible with the strip surgery because the follicular units can be seen (100%) under high powered microscopes. As far as clusters of hairs is concerned, the natural looking hair transplant uses only follicular units (clusters of follicular groups look like plugs), the normal anatomical grouping of the grafts, see photo below
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