How long does ARTAS hair transplant typically take?

This depends on how many grafts are going to be transplanted.  Generally under 1,000 grafts can be transplanted in a single day.  In my clinic, and in select clinics in the USA, cases over 1,000 grafts are split into 2 separate days: an afternoon, followed the next morning by an early start the next morning.  At 1pm on Day 1, patients arrive and we go over the consent forms, take the necessary pre-operative photographs, trim the hair for the ARTAS procedure (to be performed first thing in the morning the next day), anesthetize the scalp, perform the PRP with ACell procedure, and make all of the recipient sites for the grafts that will be transplanted.  Then, the following morning the patient returns to our Center for the ARTAS procedure.  The scalp is anesthetized, and the extractions begin with the ARTAS robot.  As soon as the extractions are completed, the patient is escorted to the placement room, and with zero delay, the grafts are placed into the recipient sites created the previous day.  This has two advantages: (1) it minimizes the time the grafts spend outside of the head, and (2) it gives the scalp a near 24 hour head start on the neovascularization of the new sites.  Both of these greatly help to keep the survival rate of the transplanted grafts at a maximum.

Depending on the number of hairs transplanted the ARTAS robotic hair restoration procedure can take from most of one day to one and a half days to complete in my clinic.  In smaller restorations (less than 1,000 grafts) the entire process can be completed in one day.  For larger procedures the first day begins in the early afternoon.  The hair is shaved, the scalp anesthetized and the recipient sites are created.  The patient then returns the following morning and the scalp is then anesthetized again and washed.  Sedation is then given and the robot is used to extract each individual follicle from the back and sides of the head.  This is done with the surgeon guiding and monitoring the robot the entire time.  Think of the robot as a tool that the surgeon uses to extract the follicles.  This portion of the procedure can take several hours.  Once all of the follicles are harvested, there is usually a break for lunch and then each follicle is manually placed into the recipient sites that were created the day before.  This takes several more hours to complete.  Thus it will take most of the day to complete the entire process.  Using the ARTAS robotic technique does take longer than a manual FUT procedure.

The length of the ARTAS procedure has been dramatically decreased for the latest update 9x.  Users with an nonupdated system will notice less than 500 grafts per hour while the updated system can harvest as much as 1000 graft or more per hour.  With the new updates the system is able to reliably obtain grafts at a much higher speed than the older versions of the ARTAS.