35 Strip Excision Techniques

Bessam Farjo

Summary

There have been many approaches to removing the donor strip over the years. The primary goal is to remove the strip with as little transection or damage to donor hair as possible. In the beginning, multibladed scalpels were used; however, it became clear that when creating one- to three-hair grafts, the multi-blade caused an unacceptable degree of transection. The single-blade harvest was clearly superior. The key to single-blade harvesting was being able to follow the angle of the hair below the skin. This takes skill and experience. Even with a lot of experience, it is a blind technique and higher transection rates can occur especially with more difficult cases who have scarring or very curled or angled hair. Recently, the use of blunt dissection with a spreader, or skin hooks to exert lateral tension and enable direct visualization, has improved our ability to harvest grafts with minimal transection on a more consistent basis. These and other aspects of strip excision techniques will be discussed in this chapter.

Key words

strip harvesting - FUT - transection rate - minimizing trauma - maximizing donor hair

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