Application of Mathematics in Hair Restoration

Application of Mathematics in Hair Restoration Surgery

Mathematics, in many ways, is the quintessence of life itself. Whether it be the interrelationship of the keys of the piano, the frequencies of the sounds around us, or the speed at which light reaches us from the most distant stars-mathematics seems to find its way into every crevice of life.

On the other hand, it would appear at first thought that the simplistic field of hair restoration surgery could somehow avoid this ever pervasive arithmetical order. But as one enters into this arena, it becomes evident that mathematics controls almost every facet of this procedure, just as it does with all earthly existence.

Be it the donor site, the recipient site, or the vectors of the advancements of scalp reductions and flaps, it becomes obvious relatively quickly that mathematics does, indeed, pervade almost every aspect of hair restoration surgery. To elucidate this realization, let us go through a few of the various subdivisions of surgical hair restoration and explore some of these mathematical relationships.

THE MATHEMATICS OF THE DONOR SITE

For many years mathematical calculation was not very important when punches were used for the donor site. The surgeon would basically make the recipient holes, then turn the patient over and remove the number of grafts that would agree with the number of holes. Simple math at best.

This, however, changed with the introduction of strip harvesting.1-3 Now the surgeon needed to calculate the width and length of the strips to be able to meet the requirements at the recipient site. When initially delving into this approach, I did, as many others: I used intuition to estimate the length and width of the strips. This approach, however, often left the patient with either too many or too few grafts for the given procedure. This rough technique also made it difficult to teach the procedure to new practitioners.

To accurately measure a strip donor harvest, one must first be able to...