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Follicular Unit Extraction (FUE)Discuss and share your photos, experiences and results related to the Follicular Unit Extraction (FUE) hair transplant procedure, including its advantages, disadvantages and who is an ideal candidate.

Recently, Coalition physician Dr. William Rassman announced a new breakthrough in follicular unit extraction hair transplantation. The new procedure is called mini-FUE and it allows for the harvesting of grafts without shaving the donor area.

At the moment, the new procedure is limited to 300 grafts or less per session but it sounds as if this may increase in the future.

Dr Rassman has not detailed how the procedure is performed but anyone interested in a small FUE without shaving is encouraged to contact him for more information.

Update - after inquiring with Dr. Rassman about how this procedure is performed, he published some more details, including this short video demonstration. Evidently, the specialized tool they are using for this procedure is the same tool they use for all of the FUE work.

While this approach may be helpful for some patients, I am not sure that this would be called a breakthrough. It has already been done.

Anyone who does FUE, could tape up hair in the donor area and trim one follicular unit then extract it before moving on to the next follicular unit to be extracted. It is slow and tedious but it is certainly possible ... especially for a small number of grafts.

For a moderate number of grafts, patients can keep their hair longer and narrow "ribbons" can be trimmed with long hair left between the ribbons. I believe I heard Dr. Martinick proposed this idea to Dr. Harris at a meeting a few years ago.

At least so far, if somone wants a larger number of grafts, shaving the donor area is most efficient.

If Dr. Rassman has figured out a way to reliably extract follicular units without having to trim the hair to see the angle, that would be interesting. I believe that Dr. Bauman also tried this in the past though.

Thank you for adding your input to this thread. At the moment, we don't have any information about Dr. Rassman's procedure other than he has stated that they have developed a new tool for this purpose and that it takes some time to develop the skills to align the hair when it is long.

We've requested some more information and will certainly elaborate when it becomes available.

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David - Forum Co-Moderator and Editorial Assistant

I am not a medical professional. All opinions are my own and my advice should not constitute as medical advice.

I've updated my original post to include some new information and a video demonstration that Dr. Rassman forwarded to us. The procedure looks very interesting and should make small FUE touch ups virtually undetectable.

Thank you to Dr. Rassman for for his prompt response to our questions.

__________________
David - Forum Co-Moderator and Editorial Assistant

I am not a medical professional. All opinions are my own and my advice should not constitute as medical advice.

I fell like people r always looking for ways to avoid ht detection but wind up sacrificing ht quality in the interim...a ht is a long term solution...to stop sugar coating it I r gonna look bad before u will look awesome...that is a fact...so many people try to avoid looking bad but this is just a fact u have to accept...I accepted it n I looked pretty bad for months...but that is nothing compared to how I look now n for the years to come...a small price to pay. So please don't try to take the easy way out bc that doesn't exist!

Thank you for sharing the video. It's nice to see the technique in action. This could have some interesting implications and I'm excited to see how it evolves in the future.

Quote:

Originally Posted by Capelli11

I fell like people r always looking for ways to avoid ht detection but wind up sacrificing ht quality in the interim...a ht is a long term solution...to stop sugar coating it I r gonna look bad before u will look awesome...that is a fact...so many people try to avoid looking bad but this is just a fact u have to accept...I accepted it n I looked pretty bad for months...but that is nothing compared to how I look now n for the years to come...a small price to pay. So please don't try to take the easy way out bc that doesn't exist!

I get what you're saying; in many cases, procedures sacrifice quality for the sake of convenience. However, Dr. Rassman has been an hair transplant innovator for quite some time, and I don't think this "trade off" is prevalent in this case. It will be interesting to see some mFUE cases posted on the forums.

Thanks for posting this video David. It is clearly a different technique. I'll take my foot out of my mouth now!

I hope that Dr. Rassman will present this at the Annual Meeting in October. This method might be quite good for eyebrow transplants where a few hundred single-haired grafts are needed and longer hair helps control the curl during placement.