Importance

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Abstract

The harvesting of hair for a hair transplant procedure with immediate placement of the hair grafts to the balding area, employs a hollow drill connected to a suction with an imaging system (containing one or more cameras) which permits alignment of the center of the cutting edge of the needle on or slightly offset from the axis of the hair within the follicular unit to be removed. This harvesting tool may be robotically controlled. As each follicular unit may have more than one hair, the surgeon controls the number of hairs in each graft he wishes to remove, excising the graft one at a time. A special FUE tool is used that excises the entire follicular unit with minimal residual attachments. The tool utilizes vacuum to facilitate complete excision. The graft that is excised is sucked though tubing and almost instantaneously delivered to an implanter held by the surgeon (Duplex Implanter) or by a robot. This graft on Demand system is controlled by the surgeon through a series of commands to the handpiece of the implanter for one, two, three or more hair grafts. The excision needle (punch) is placed to remove a hair graft with the chosen number of hairs, taken from an area which has been previously mapped out. When properly aligned, a follicular unit is removed without damaging critical anatomical portions of the follicles and it is delivered to the implanter at the command of the surgeon. In one embodiment, a movable x/y/z stabilizing gantry is employed to position the hollow needle in each instance which can be manually controlled by the surgeon, or robotically controlled with one or more robots. In another embodiment, a computer maps out the location of every graft within the surgical field of view, in part or in whole, and selects those follicles, minimizing the spacing left remaining after each excision while obtaining the number of grafts targeted by the surgeon. In still another embodiment, one or more robotic arms, controlled automatically by a controller or manually by a surgeon, operate graft excision instruments to facilitate speed and accuracy of the excision process.

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First Claim