Wesley's nightmare with Dr Nigam

[youngin]

choi implanters are the worse anyway. they are only used by lazy surgeons who want to speed up the procedure, at the cost of the patient and follicle survival.
choi implanters treat the follicle relatively harshly, therefore graft survival is worse. and the needle diameter is about 0.2 to 0.3 mm bigger than standard needles which creates much more trauma. a 0.8mm hole is much worse than 0.6mm.

i remember a youtube video where a surgeon is proudly showing how he is implanting 3000 or so grafts in 1 hour, with several choi implanters which are loaded by his assistants.
that's about 1 second per graft. i think it's clear that this won't lead to a good cosmetic result.

i think there's not one well respected surgeon who is working with choi implanters. those with good results are doing the slits and placement of the graft only manually, which of course takes more time.

everybody who is considering a hair transplant should not go for a treatment if the surgeon is using choi implanters. but that's only my opinion.

Dr. Hakan Doganay has some pretty stellar results using the choi implanters. Also...

Most devices, however, do not clearly exceed the efficacy or ability of an experienced assistant using a forceps. Currently, two devices have some merit: the Choi Implanter and the Hair Implanter Pen.
• The Choi Implanter: The Choi Implanter is composed of a needle that is left open along one side. The placer loads a single FU into the needle and then inserts the needle into the scalp, carrying the FU along with it. After insertion, the instrument allows the placer to withdraw the needle and, at the same, to leave the hair behind in the scalp. Doctors in Korea use this device extensively, and it works well for the very coarse hair of the native Korean population. It is unknown, however, if the Choi Implanter works as well for less coarse hair. Drawbacks of this device are its expense, its inability to be reused, the need for at least one extra person to place the graft in the implanter, and its minimal availability outside of Korea.
• Two new developments, however, may increase the use of this device in other countries: 1) the creation of a replaceable needle that significantly reduces the cost and increases the availability of this device, and 2) the modification/simplification of this device so that it only inserts the graft instead of both making the incision and inserting the graft, thus allowing practices that do not currently use a stick and place approach to employ the Choi Implanter adeptly.

-Ron Shapiro