Current Advancements in The ARTAS Hair Transplant System - Dr. Craig Ziering

that's awesome! Seeing hard work and dedication resulting in advancements and happiness is so rewarding. Working out the manufacturing line, 4prongs needles and 6mm punch both 18g and 19g will be available soon to all ARTAS Users...stay tuned

Gabe, what do you believe the ultimate gage (size vs transection rate) is, and do you think ARTAS will go smaller than 18g punches in the future.

Also, is there a way to invest in the company?

Hi Occulus:

couple of clarifications around ARTAS Terminology:

18g = 1mm
19g = 0.9mm

we measure needles in gauge not in millimeters simply because historically needles are measured in gauge.

As far as I have tested and documented internally 18g and 19g give you the same TX rate, however, that doesn't mean you can just drop the 18g needles all togethers. On some patients you will get better results with 18g and on some they are equivalent thus you may as well use the 19g.

Conceptually my recommendation is to always start with 19g needles. Also don't forget as you start using smaller needles your grafts becomes thinner and more delicate thus techs qualification becomes more crucial

In regard to smaller needles for ARTAS we are looking into 20g 0.8-0.85mm. There are two ways to get to that mm size either by finding a 20g tube or a thick wall 19g and then grinding it down. We will see what we end up, the lead time for the steal is 12 weeks so I won't have anything for another 2 months.

In regard to your last question I will send you a personal note as I have to seek internally the proper way to answer

Great video! Spencer really makes everything so clear. I think the doctors who are using technicians are too lazy to learn to do FUE themselves and too cheap to buy the artas. That was a scary story he told about the technician destroying so much hair. I bet this is more common then is talked about. I mean how would a person really know? Usually if someone posts that they got no growth the doctor blames the patient, but it was probably because the clinic destroyed the grafts by using cheap help.

Any updates on this? I can't wait to see how far this advances.

Oculus in regards to the latter part of your question..i'd be more then happy to answer/facilitate as I'm one of the largest shareholders in the company.

From what I have been hearing on The Bald Truth show, it seems like the ARTAS advancements have been pretty impressive, but like Dr. Bauman points out, the robot is only as good as the doctor who is running it. I like the idea of it, but I would only consider an IAHRS surgeon who knows what they are doing and has had a great deal of FUE experience. As I’m learning more, it seems like techs still carryout the bulk of the important work like placement of grafts and pulling them from the scalp once they are cut out by the robot. If the doctor and their staff don’t know what they are doing, even if the robot is more accurate(which we don’t really know if it is) in cutting, the grafts can still be mishandled by the techs and the graft placement can be poor if the doctor does not have the right training. I think there are only a few IAHRS doctors who use it, but they are real pros and further refine the grafts after extraction and have the experience to know when the robot is appropriate to use on a specific patient. I notice that in this video https://www.baldtruthtalk.com/thread...ant-DocuSeries Dr. Arocha who has an ARTAS chose to use a hand punch for this patient, so I’m assuming ARTAS was not appropriate for this person. Only a real expert would know that, so the advancements are very cool, but it looks like the best doctors have different tools for different people.

It’s quite disturbing to see a major shareholder in the ARTAS company soliciting anonymous people on a public message forum to help “facilitate” them to invest in a company. I’m not even sure of the legality of this, but as someone who has been around these forums for many years, this reeks of desperation and should give people pause. History dictates that any doctor or company that has come on hair loss forums (think Dr. Nigam and that other company, forgot the name) looking for money or trying to help people “facilitate” direct contact to how to invest in technology has never turned out well.

I was really hoping ARTAS was the real deal, based on Spencer’s show and that it just made sense to me. but I’m now thinking that it probably won’t amount to much. The only things I read on other forums now are negative and there are only 4 or 5 respected doctors on this forum who post ARTAS results. So while they are getting good results with it, I agree that it’s probably because they know what they are doing in general. The results on the ARTAS website have photoshopped backgrounds and they look like they are the type of pictures from Bosley or something, so all we have to go on is what is being posted here and most of the doctors here who use ARTAS show more results from either strip or FUE using another instrument. No disrespect to Spencer, I believe he thinks that this technology has great potential and he is the only person I really trust, but all signs point to ARTAS not being able to really make much of an impact, if the largest shareholder with 1 post to his name is coming on here trying to raise money, that is a really bad sign for the future of this technology.

Joe Tillman, I know you read this forum, can you ask Spencer what he thinks about this on the show, I’d be very interested to hear his response. Thank you.

It's far more profitable for a Doc to talk a patient into any other procedure besides ARTAS. That's because ARTAS gets $1 for every punch. Not to mention the fact that these machines cost doctors 1/4 million dollars. I'd bet the company is not as cash strapped (at least their financials don't indicate so) as you think.

I had multiple docs try and steer me away from the ARTAS, completely based on cost/ profit. It's a buisness man, docs gotta make their Tesla payment.

Lastly, I'm not aware of any industry where robots do a lesser job than humans and professionals continue to buy them. Robots are doing actual life saving surgeries currently too.

From what is being presented I would say that at this point the ARTAS does a good job extracting on patients who are candidates for larger punch sizes. Even with the smallest punches the robot uses the scaring is a bit larger than other instruments. (I’m assuming this based on the size of the holes left behind) I was a fan and I’m really into the technology, but the results seem to fall short except by the doctors who know what they are doing, which seem to be only a few. I disagree about it being more profitable for doctors to talk you out of the ARTAS. Since they can charge more it’s really a wash, unless the robot limits their ability to transplant more grafts in a single session, which might be the case, so if that is then it’s better for both the doctor and the patients to get more grafts in one session as long as it is a reasonable amount. They either talk the person out of it because they know the results will fall short for that particular patient or because it might be easier to perform a strip or FUE using other methods and offer the patient a “discount”.
I would love to see their financials, can you point me to where I can find them?

As far a robots performing life saving surgery today, from all the research I have done, if I was going to have urological surgery or some other life saving surgery, I’d far prefer to go to a true expert in laparoscopic surgery than a place that uses a robot. After 15 years in use, outcomes still seem to be better doing surgery by hand. and far less of a burden on the healthcare system.

An example is the da Vinci robot.
“This is a technology that is costing the healthcare system hundreds of millions of dollars and has been marketed as a miracle — and it’s not,” said Dr. John Santa, medical director at Consumer Reports Health. “It’s a fancier way of doing what we’ve always been able to do.”

Da Vinci was originally designed to do cardiovascular surgery, but it’s fallen out of favor for heart surgeries. Next it was picked up for gynecological surgeries. In 2013, the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists (ACOG) said it wasn’t the best, or even the second-best option, for noncancerous gynecological surgeries.

Here’s the whole article. I’ve read some very scary things about it.

If your business buys a $250,000 machine mine buys a $5,500 handheld machine for FUE extraction and we do the same number of surgeries, which is more profitable? Who's balance sheet would you rather have?

It’s not that cut and dry. Remember, even if a doctor charges only $2 more per graft for an ARTAS hair transplant, he needs less staff then say for strip and he if he has a cheaper machine he has to pay the techs to extract, so he makes even less money per operation. Say he only does small cases of 1500 grafts, multiply that by 200 surgeries a year and the machine is paid for. The reality is that these doctors are charging sometimes 3 or 4 dollars more per graft for ARTAS. I’ve heard of a clinic charging $9 per graft.

This show opened my eyes to how things work. It’s very enlightening.

Wrong again, I had ARTAS last week and the techs stood around and dabbed blood, moved the extraction square around my head and asked how I was doing. Once the machine was done they all started implanting after the doc made the sites. The same 3 techs who would be doing the manual extraction were still there and still had to manually implant.

I didn't read about my experience with a robot online, I had a procedure done by one. I am going off my experience not someone else.

It’s not about being right or wrong, it’s about what is. In 99% of clinics Techs do all the implantation of the grafts, that’s common knowledge If you were not aware of that going in, then you didn’t do the appropriate amount of research. That’s their job. they are either paid hourly or on salary. When Techs are hired to do extractions, they are paid differently and a lot more money in general. If you feel the need to be right, that’s fine, I’m just attempting to give you the facts. Spreading misinformation does not help anyone. You may have had your ARTAS experience, but it’s clear that you don’t really understand how these doctors and clinics work. I doubt that you asked how much the technicians who were dabbing your blood and implanting your grafts were being paid, so your experience does not really relate to your assumptions about how much more or less doctors make, etc. It’s spelled out in that video I linked to and if you listen to The Bald Truth show, you would have a better understanding of it. They talk about this all the time.