Arrival at Barr Plastic Surgery

Upon your arrival at Barr Plastic Surgery, a patient coordinator will greet you and bring you to a pre-operative area, where you will review and sign a surgical consent form. Dr. Barr will review the planned procedure with you and address any unanswered questions you may. You will be given some mild medication to ensure that you are relaxed during the procedure.

Length of the Procedure

The Follicular Unit Transplant procedure is very specialized and meticulous, and involves the participation of multiple medical personnel. Depending on the number of grafts involved, procedures can require anywhere from two to several hours. The highly trained technicians and medical personnel involved in your care ensure that the length of the procedure is minimized. A procedure of 1500 grafts would require, on average, approximately 6 hours.  

Your Surgical Experience

You will be lightly sedated and can watch TV or sleep if you desire. Injections around the perimeter of the scalp will numb your entire scalp so that the area being transplanted is not directly anesthetized. Once the sedation takes effect, most patients choose to watch TV or movies; however, it is not uncommon for a patient to sleep throughout part of the procedure. While the process itself can last many hours, it will seem to you that the time went by very quickly. You are free to take breaks during the transplant process, eat lunch, visit the washroom and move around. You will feel no discomfort during your procedure and will find it to be a generally pleasant experience. 

Donor Scalp

Once the donor hair tissue has been harvested from the back of the scalp, the donor area is suture and closed with self dissolving sutures. The donor tissue is then meticulously dissected into individual follicular units, each containing from 1 to 4 hairs. The grafts are trimmed of extraneous fatty tissue and the bald intervening skin between the groups is discarded.

The process of microscopically dissecting and isolating naturally occurring follicular units without damage is a critical component of Follicular Unit Transplantation. If damage occurs to the follicular units during this process, long term growth of the donor hair can be impaired.  

Grafts and Blood Supply

Once the donor strip is removed from the back of the scalp, it is immediately placed in a cold saline solution to lower its temperature. After the individual follicular units are prepared, they are kept at a cool temperature until they are placed into the recipient sites. As many hours may pass between the time the donor grafts are removed from the back of the scalp to the time they are placed into the recipient area, extreme care must be taken to preserve the viability of the grafts.

Recipient Sites

The placement and angles of the recipient sites are critically important in creating a natural looking, aesthetically appealing scalp appearance. Dr. Barr uses the lateral-slit technique when creating recipient sites, which is the only surgical technique that mimics the natural alignment and distribution of hair.
These variables ultimately determine the angles at which the new hair will grow, its distribution and its density. This is a very important component of the FUT procedure and requires considerable artistic knowledge and surgical skill. Dr. Barr will take extreme care in choosing the distribution and angle of each recipient site to ensure your satisfaction with your final result.  

Placement of New Grafts