Dr. Robert Bernstein discusses the benefits of the ARTAS® Robotic Hair Transplant system in The Aesthetic Guide, a leading periodical in the field of aesthetic surgery. The article examines how robotic Follicular Unit Extraction (FUE) procedures are an improvement over FUE using handheld devices.
In the article, Dr. Bernstein explains how surgeons performing manual FUE need to calculate the angle, spacing, direction, depth, and orientation for each follicular unit harvested. The fact that this process must be repeated up to thousands of times per patient gives the manual FUE procedure significant variability.
Dr. Bernstein touches on a key reason why the image-guided robot is an improvement over manual techniques:
“The ARTAS robot is one of the first technologies used in practice where the computer of the robot is actually obtaining feedback from the anatomy of the patient. In this case, the robot is getting feedback regarding the distribution and direction of hair follicles. That information is communicated to the computer in real time and the computer makes adjustments as it continues to harvest the grafts, which is why the system is so accurate.”
The robot’s capability of making microscopic adjustments in real time, based on the characteristics of the patient’s skin, is a technological breakthrough in the field of hair restoration. Not only does the robot not tire when performing thousands of graft dissections, it estimates the position of the follicle under the skin more reliably than a human. According to Dr. Bernstein; “the accuracy of the robot remains consistent,” throughout the entire procedure, graft by graft.
This accuracy and consistency is critical in a hair transplant because the yield of healthy, viable grafts is one of the key factors in a successful procedure. If a surgeon, using manual techniques, transects (or cuts) a graft or doesn’t cut deeply enough into the skin tissue, then that graft might not survive the transplant. If a number of transected or damaged grafts don’t survive the transplant, then the result of the procedure will be limited in the aesthetic benefit that the surgery was designed to provide.
The article, which is titled “ARTAS Improves Hair Graft Accuracy and Consistency,” notes that Dr. Bernstein was one of the first physicians in the United States to use FUE robot in his practice, “one of the leading hair restoration centers in the country.”
