New Scientist Magazine
14 May 08
http://email.newscientist.com:80/cgi-bi ... oL0E2Mb0E7
A robot that can pluck and move individual hair follicles on a person's head makes hair transplants look more natural than those performed by humans, a US company claims.
The robot can also perform the procedure twice as fast as human clinicians, with less pain and scarring for the patient, says Restoration Robotics of Mountain View, California.
Standard hair transplants typically take 8 to 10 hours. A strip of healthy, hairy scalp 1 centimetre wide and 15 cm long is removed from the back of the head under local anaesthetic.
After the gap is sewn up, medical staff then manually separate the strip into 2000 individual hair follicle "bulbs". These are painstakingly implanted in 1-millimetre wide incisions across bald parts of the head.
Head gardener
The result? Strong hair grows in months, says Richard Rogers, a hair transplant surgeon in London, UK, who has treated celebrities such as Status Quo's Francis Rossi.
"It's a lot like gardening," says Rogers. "Removing the strip is like pulling turf and implantation is like planting bulbs."
But Frederic Moll of Restoration Robotics says the expensive (from around £3000, or $5800), time consuming and repetitive task needs automating.
Instead of removing a strip of scalp, which is painful and carries the risk of infection, his robot plucks healthy follicles individually, at a rate up to 1000 an hour.
Harvest time
A 1mm wide hollow needle removes the follicles using suction. The device is guided by cameras and 3D imaging software, and mounted on an arm normally used to place microchips on circuit boards.
"It understands what trajectory it needs to get follicles out of the scalp, compensating in real time if the patient moves slightly," says Moll.
That is made possible using the same techniques that allow other surgical robots to synchronise with the movements of a beating heart.
Once the "harvest" is over, the patient sits up to let the robot implant the follicles into the top of their head. The whole process should take just 5 hours, says Jim McCollum, also of Restoration Robotics.
'Natural' hairlineThe robot has another advantage over manual transplants – the ability to design somebody's hairline on a computer. This can help give the transplanted hair a more natural look.
"We can be careful about what we put where. You can take an image of the head and let the robot figure out how best to create a pattern that looks most natural for that patient," says Moll.
Brad Nelson, who works on surgical robots at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich, agrees. "There could be some real improvements in hair placement with this robot. Surgeons often do it too perfectly and you can just tell it has been transplanted," he says.
The robot is currently honing its skills on volunteers, says McCollum. Later this year he expects to file an application for full clinical trials with the US Food and Drug Administration.
14 May 08
http://email.newscientist.com:80/cgi-bi ... oL0E2Mb0E7
A robot that can pluck and move individual hair follicles on a person's head makes hair transplants look more natural than those performed by humans, a US company claims.
The robot can also perform the procedure twice as fast as human clinicians, with less pain and scarring for the patient, says Restoration Robotics of Mountain View, California.
Standard hair transplants typically take 8 to 10 hours. A strip of healthy, hairy scalp 1 centimetre wide and 15 cm long is removed from the back of the head under local anaesthetic.
After the gap is sewn up, medical staff then manually separate the strip into 2000 individual hair follicle "bulbs". These are painstakingly implanted in 1-millimetre wide incisions across bald parts of the head.
Head gardener
The result? Strong hair grows in months, says Richard Rogers, a hair transplant surgeon in London, UK, who has treated celebrities such as Status Quo's Francis Rossi.
"It's a lot like gardening," says Rogers. "Removing the strip is like pulling turf and implantation is like planting bulbs."
But Frederic Moll of Restoration Robotics says the expensive (from around £3000, or $5800), time consuming and repetitive task needs automating.
Instead of removing a strip of scalp, which is painful and carries the risk of infection, his robot plucks healthy follicles individually, at a rate up to 1000 an hour.
Harvest time
A 1mm wide hollow needle removes the follicles using suction. The device is guided by cameras and 3D imaging software, and mounted on an arm normally used to place microchips on circuit boards.
"It understands what trajectory it needs to get follicles out of the scalp, compensating in real time if the patient moves slightly," says Moll.
That is made possible using the same techniques that allow other surgical robots to synchronise with the movements of a beating heart.
Once the "harvest" is over, the patient sits up to let the robot implant the follicles into the top of their head. The whole process should take just 5 hours, says Jim McCollum, also of Restoration Robotics.
'Natural' hairlineThe robot has another advantage over manual transplants – the ability to design somebody's hairline on a computer. This can help give the transplanted hair a more natural look.
"We can be careful about what we put where. You can take an image of the head and let the robot figure out how best to create a pattern that looks most natural for that patient," says Moll.
Brad Nelson, who works on surgical robots at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich, agrees. "There could be some real improvements in hair placement with this robot. Surgeons often do it too perfectly and you can just tell it has been transplanted," he says.
The robot is currently honing its skills on volunteers, says McCollum. Later this year he expects to file an application for full clinical trials with the US Food and Drug Administration.
