FUE Hair Transplant – Robotic vs. Traditional Surgery

6 July, 2021 | Hair Loss | Author : Shveta Virmani

A Hair Society report suggests that around 35 million men and 21 million women worldwide suffer from conditions like alopecia that lead to substantial hair loss. The numbers are alarming in India too, so patients are consistently looking for experienced surgeons to undergo the best hair transplant in India.

Amidst all the concerned individuals, over 6,50,000 people choose hair transplant as the most effective treatment for receding hairline and consistent hair loss. However, the introduction of advanced medical technologies has paved the way for more treatment options.

FUE hair transplant, for example, has now diversified into robotic surgeries, ensuring precision and higher success rates. However, is robotic hair transplant a better option than traditional surgery? We will be discussing everything related to that in this article.

Feel free to skip ahead if one topic catches your eye:

Takeaway

1. What is FUE Hair Transplant?

Follicular Unit Extraction or FUE is a cutting-edge and leading type of hair transplant that involves extracting individual hair follicles from the donor site and implanting them to the recipient site on the scalp.

While patients complained about the “hair plugs” look from the standard FUT hair transplant, FUE hair transplant doesn’t involve making incisions and instead relies on micro punches to extract the viable hair follicles to ensure a successful transplant.

FUE hair transplant is an extremely precise and effective procedure, provided that it has a quicker recovery timeline and is done as an outpatient procedure that might last a maximum of 12 hours for a mega session.

Undergoing FUE hair transplant can show promising results 3-4 months after the surgery. However, you need to be mindful of any prominent side effects and report back to your surgeon if the symptoms are persistent and are present even after a few days.

| Also Read: FUE vs. FUT: What Type of Hair Transplant is Best for you? |

Perfect-i Hair Transplant

Perfect-i is a refined way of conducting an FUE hair transplant, ensuring instant extraction and implantation of the hair follicles to save time and viability of the extracted follicles. Typically, a hair follicle (once extracted) can last up to 6 hours, after that it dies.

In a traditional FUE hair transplant, the extracted follicles are out of your donor site for over 4 hours before they are implanted. This leads to the loss of over 30% of the extracted hair follicles. Perfect-i reduces the risks and makes the most out of every extracted hair follicle.

Perfect-i hair transplantation also uses the "feather touch" implantation technique to ensure successful implantation of the follicles by holding the dead hair instead of meddling with the roots. This reduces damage inflicted to the hair roots and ensures higher success rates.

At Medlinks, our team of expert hair transplant specialists are trained to perform the reverse transplantation with the highest precision level to meet the patients' rising expectations. The optimal care results in 30% faster regrowth of the transplanted hair after the procedure.

Expectations after a Hair Transplant

If you are undergoing an FUE hair transplant procedure, the last thing you want to do is expect instant results right after the treatment. Not only is it exaggerated, but physiologically impossible. The predictability of the results after the surgery is pretty drastic.

Here’s what you can expect after undergoing the FUE hair transplant surgery:

Shedding of the implanted hair occurs for 4-6 weeks after the surgery.
Up to 50% of the hair will penetrate through the scalp five months into the surgery.
After 6-9 months, patients can start seeing noticeable growth and transformation to their recipient site.
By 12 months, the patient could start seeing prominent hair regrowth.

While the above are the results you can see, the expectations include a few downsides and complications.

You might experience pain and tenderness on your scalp, especially around the treated area.
Avoid combing your scalp and hair for up to 3 weeks to keep the implanted hair follicles in place.
You might witness bleeding and numbness around the scalp for up to a week after the surgery.
Getting back to routine life can take between 2-4 weeks, depending on the patient’s recovery rate.

Depending on your hair quality and rate of regrowth, you might not experience the same voluminous regrowth after surgery, which is entirely normal.

| Also Read: Is One Hair Transplant Enough for a Lifetime? |

2. Manual Hair Transplant

When discussing hair transplant FUE, the most traditional and commonly used method is when the surgeons extract and implant the follicles by hand and without computerized assistance. This has been in practice across several cosmetic clinics across India, offering pretty considerate and successful results.

Here’s what happens during the manual hair transplant:

The surgeon starts by shaving down the donor and recipient site.
Once done, the surgeon applies a numbing cream to reduce any risks of pain sensation for the patient.
Once the patient is prepped for the surgery, a micro-puncture tool is used to extract individual hair follicles from the donor site.
The extracted follicles are then implanted into the recipient site where the surgeon makes smaller incisions.
Once all the follicles are implanted, the surgeon will clean the treated area on the scalp and then bandage around to ensure quicker recovery.

Pros and Cons of Manual Hair Transplant

With a manual hair transplant, the most significant benefit you get is the cost-effectiveness of the procedure. Compared to robotic hair transplant costs, traditional or manual surgery is a lot more in the ordinary people's budget, making it a lot more accessible.

One downside to manual surgery is that it leaves room for error. Since it is not computerized or robot-guided, there are always chances of a lack of precision in the surgery. Even the best hair transplant surgeon in India can leave room for errors when doing the transplant manually.

3. Robotic Hair Transplant

Robotic hair transplant in India is a clinically proven hair restorative surgery done across some of India's advanced hair transplant clinics, offering proven success rates with heightened precision.

Unlike the traditional hair transplant procedure, the Artas hair transplant ensures heightened precision with the extraction of hair roots. It uses a robotic arm, which programs based on optics. The robotic approach extracts the unit hair follicles by micro-puncturing the donor site with circular incisions.

Since this is an entire computerized procedure, it is programmed to measure the angle of the natural hair growth to punch the holes on the scalp for easy extraction of each viable hair follicle. Once all the hair follicles are successfully harvested, the implantation process is done manually by the surgeon.

4. Robotic vs. Traditional – Which one to choose?

Let us just preface this by saying that both the procedures show viable and successful results, provided you are getting it done by the best hair transplant surgeon in India.

That said, the entire choice is upon the patient and their budget for undergoing the procedure. We’d highly recommend looking into the good and the bad sides to both the surgical procedures and choose the one that deems the best for you.

Remember that the implantation procedure is done manually in both the cases, which means that in the Artas hair transplant in India only involves using a robotic arm for the harvesting of the hair follicles. However, this ensures a higher rate of survival and heightened viability of the extracted follicles.

With the robotic hair transplant, it ensures that the quality of the last harvested hair graft is of the same quality as the first graft. The Artas procedure also uses the state-of-the-art imaging system and selection algorithms for extraction of the best and potent follicles from the scalp.

Artas is also programmed to analyze the hair density in each site to extract the quality grafts with the right hair densities. The rightful extraction ensures that there is optimal distribution of the hair grafts even in the donor site after extraction.

Another reason why robotic hair transplant is considered a superior option as opposed to the manual transplant is because it eliminates the risks of fatigue and ensures lesser complications. With manual extraction, you have that lingering risk of inflicting damage to the existing hair follicles, which is quite questionable, to say the least.

So, it goes without saying that if you have the budget to spare, we’d recommend you opt for the robotic hair transplant over the manual or traditional hair transplant surgery.

5. Cost of Hair Transplant in India

The hair transplant surgery cost in India is subjective to the kind of procedure you are undergoing and also the associated factors involved in it.

The fue hair transplant cost in delhi can range between INR 20 to INR 30 per graft. So, the overall cost of the surgery can start from INR 30,000 for every 1000 grafts that are harvested and implanted. However, this indicates the cost of the surgery, there are other allied costs involved too.

On the other hand, the robotic hair transplant cost in India can range between INR 60 to INR 100 per graft. So, you can expect the treatment cost to start from INR 1,00,000 and increase depending on the number of follicles that need to be implanted.

Some of the common factors that can influence the cost of the hair transplant surgery include:

Number of grafts required
Number of sessions required
Cost levied by the surgeon and the clinic
Type of hair transplant procedure the patient is undergoing
City in which you are getting the surgery

Takeaway

Hair transplant surgery is one of the leading cosmetic surgeries done in both men and women across the world. As the technology advances, more and more new techniques are being introduced and robotic hair transplant is one of them. Although quite new, this offers a refined mode of surgery for higher success rates and precision. However, we can’t overrule traditional hair transplant surgery too. So, we have drawn a comparison in this article, hoping it would help guide your decision in the right way.

Medlink uses cutting-edge technology resulting in the highest level of service and treatment standards for patients across India and worldwide. We can refer this as the best Hair Transplant Centre in India.