Dr. Mark DiStefano has been elected to the Board of Directors for the American Board of Hair Restoration Surgery & International Board of Hair Restoration Surgery (ABHRS/IBHRS).

Safe Scribe™

Safe Scribe™ is a new surgical power instrument designed to isolate, cut out and remove a small number of hairs from the back of the head or the donor region where the hairs are to be extracted for transplantation.

Until the early 1990s, hair transplantation involved removing plugs of 10 to 25 hairs. This produced a relatively unnatural result compared to today’s methods.

The Transplantation

Among today’s techniques, two are used most often to transplant hair from the donor to the recipient regions of the scalp.

  • Follicular Unit Transplantation (FUT): involves the removal of a strip of hair follicles that under the microscope are divided into natural-looking units of one to four hairs. These units are then transplanted into the recipient area of the scalp
  • Follicular Unit Extraction (FUE): a procedure in which individual follicular units containing one to four hairs are removed individually and transplanted to the front, top, or side of the head.

FUE is the newer of the two procedures. It can be more time consuming and therefore more expensive than FUT, but healing is faster and the scars left in the donor areas are virtually invisible.

How Safe Scribe™ Fits In

The Safe Scribe™ is a power surgical instrument that replaces the manual punch that surgeons use to extract the follicular units. According to the developer of the new instrument, some of its benefits include the fact that it:

  • Causes virtually no pain
  • Leaves behind no scars the naked eye can see
  • Is easier to use and thus requires less training for the surgical staff
  • Causes less damage to the hair follicle
  • Decreases the time needed for the scalp to heal
  • Reduces the time in surgery by about half
  • Nearly doubles the number of units extracted in the same amount of time
  • Saves money

Dr. James A. Harris, director of Hair Sciences Center of Colorado, developed Safe Scribe™. He introduced the new instrument in July 2009 at the 17th Annual Scientific Meeting of the International Society of Hair Restoration Surgery in Amsterdam.

For more information about Safe Scribe™ or other cutting edge technologies used at DiStefano Hair Restoration Center, contact us today.