by Kevin Rands

The new trend in Hair Transplant Surgery, FUE is being attempted by a handful of surgeons interested in the possibility of offering consumers an alternative to standard strip incision. We’ve got photos of one of Dr. John Cole’s recent procedures, which he’s dubbing the “Follicular Isolation Technique”…

Dr. John Cole

The popularity of Follicular Unit Extraction comes out of the consumer’s fears, realistically founded or not, of the traditional strip incision techniques currently being used by today’s transplant surgeons. While the current FUT (Follicular Unit Transection) procedure is well established, effective, and completely safe in the hands of a skilled surgeon, some surgeons are experimenting with their own techniques that do not include strip incision.

Dr. John Cole recently informed HairlossTalk that he is performing his own version of the new Follicular Unit Extraction method, and is calling it “Follicular Isolation Technique”. While the technology is still new, and the methods are far from perfected, it is nonetheless interesting to see what success certain surgeons are having with this new procedure.

Some comments from Dr. Cole on the procedure:

A special instrument is used to extract the individual follicular units. This instrument must cut into the dermis to a point just deep to the arrector pili muscle. Once this structure is cut, the graft can be extracted intact. Grafts ranging from one to 5 hairs each have been extracted. Our technique has allowed the largest single session of graft removal in a single day. We successfully removed 950 intact follicular units in a single day. We also have the largest successive sessions in a two day span on the same patient. Currently, we are able to move almost 2000 grafts in a two day time using our follicular isolation technique.

This process requires a dermal depth analysis so that we can properly judge the depth of the arrector pili muscle. We have found that this depth varies from one region of the donor area to another.

Our process allows for the harvesting of hair from multiple regions of the body. This includes chest, stomach, back, etc. hair. The combination of this technique with standard graft harvesting expands the scalp donor region. The ability to use hair from other regions of the body also adds significantly to the total amount of available donor hair. Dr. Ray Woods has found that chest hair grafted to the scalp eventually begins to grow faster and longer than it did when it was on the chest.