Los Angeles hair transplant surgeon, Dr. Sansui Umar, calls the show to discuss the possible advantages of the use of ultrasonic energy to help score the skin and extract grafts in FUE hair transplant surgery.

Spencer Kobren: Doctor, we were speaking about this earlier and I'm fascinated by this. I don't think a lot of people have really been made privy to the information that you provided me with. Correct me if I'm wrong but we were talking about ultrasonic FUE. Tell me about it, tell me how you got and essentially came up with this and let's talk about the advantages.

Sanusi Umar: The quest came -- the breakthrough happened when in my quest for a tool that does African-American hair or the African hair FUE. When I came up with this tool that does not require any rotation, I noticed that it's a manual device, obviously there's a little effort involved in doing the extraction. Whatever will make the procedure easier and still maintain integrity of graph and efficacy it's improvement.

The concept of using ultrasound to enhance the effectiveness of the punch to engage the skin and bring out the graph without too much effort on the part of the patient was my priority at that point I thought ultrasound--I added  ultrasonic vibration to the tool using the ultrasonic energy to enhance the ability of the tool to easily score the graft without too much effort trying-

Spencer Kobren: I don't want to over simplify this but we're also essentially talking about  a similar technology to the ultrasonic toothbrush as far as that movement, that speed, that vibration.

Sanusi Umar: The concepts will actually similar, you got it. But even in more in close, would be a dental scaler. If you're using old fashioned scalers that are not ultrasonic, you will find that the dentist will have to exert a lot of effort to scrape out the plaque. The ultrasound basically breaks off the plaques just using the ultrasonic frequency and energy.

That's the concept that we decided to use here. A certain frequency is -- and I had to do the research to find actual frequency to dial that would be safer for the graphs so to give you what you want to achieve without causing any damage or burns. That was the next step and now-

Spencer Kobren:  That's pretty fascinating, what have your colleagues -- I don't know how much you've shared with your colleagues yet but for those you've shared this with, what's their response?

Sanusi Umar: When I first presented this in Malaysia so that was four years ago I guess, and it was not  received well. I think few people understood what was being discussed but when it becomes available, then it will be very obvious that things are changing because implication for this tool is, we will considerably be doing FUE without rotary tools, without any drills.

Spencer Kobren: You are removing heat sources, torsion, twisting all the stuff that comes along with rotary tools.

Sanusi Umar: That’s all gone and it will be a lot easier all you do keep plunging and graphs keep coming up. That's the concept we’re looking at now, so this promise is to change [crosstalk]-

Spencer Kobren:  You’re going have a lot of haters in the industry because if this works the way that it sounds like it's going to work, there's at least one guy who  is going to lose his mind.

Sanusi Umar: While the manual version of tools of how they work, we can do FUE now without rotary tools. Asians with any type of hair  and then we have the version that does the textured hair, all those will be applicable and we can use ultrasonic as well. Remarkably, the other thing also is that this has a special place in performing FUE without shaving the hair, so what we call “No shaving long hair FUE” this ultrasonic device will probably become the standard for that type of procedure. As we all know one of the things that discourages people from FUE is a concept of being shaved, they don't want to shave their heads. Right now there're already ways to do that.  

Spencer Kobren: But the hair is going to entangle on a rotating part, that's why you have to do it by hand. 

Sanusi Umar: Now we have a tool that doesn't rotate and the ultrasound will actually traverse and cut the hair that you're interested in cutting and then still pull out the graft. That’s all we're looking at.