Local Patient Is First In World To Receive New Restoration Procedure

By Christine Chang, 7NEWS Anchor

DENVER — A robotic arm, used to harvest hair from a person’s head, sounds strange but it’s the newest way to combat hair loss.”I started losing my hair in my early 20′s,” said 38-year-old Vincent Delany. “It started receding back where I just had a little strip. Then my crown started thinning a lot where you can actually see scalp.”It was a big enough concern that Delany looked into hair restoration surgery. He tried the traditional graft harvest, also known as the strip method. This is when a strip of skin is removed and doctors remove the follicular unit grafts one by one under a microscope. The method can be tedious and long.

Just this April, the Food and Drug Administration approved a revolutionary technology — the ARTAS System from Restoration Robotics, Inc.”It’s a level of precision that can’t be matched anywhere else,” said Dr. James Harris with Hair Sciences Center of Colorado in the Denver Tech Center.

Harris uses a robotic arm, controlled through a remote control, to remove follicular units, one by one, from the scalp.”We can remove about 50 percent of the hair in any one area without having it look thinner,” said Harris.Harris said the strip method would usually leave a large scar, whereas the new method using the ARTAS System would leave minimal scarring, at most, little red dots. The recovery time is also shorter with the new method.Right now, doctors still have to manually transfer the hair units to the balding areas. But Harris said that will likely soon change with this robotic technology.”When it starts growing in two or three months and starts coming in, it just looks natural,” said Delany.The process costs about $7,000 to $8,000 for an average patient.

If you’d like more information, you can contact Harris at the Hair Sciences Center of Colorado at hsccolorado.com.