HASCI analysis w/ photos - results

[AlmostUndone]

It's nearing the end of our analysis, perhaps the most comprehensive to date of dr. Gho's method. This procedure for 800 grafts was done in May 2015, by a dr., in Netherlands. I'll try to break in the facts in logical order.

Note: For image viewing, don't use any of Windows' standard image viewers, as they cause pixelation. Use some other, such as the browser's image viewing capability or Picasa.



First you must look how my donor was doing just following the procedure:

Left side link with an added image just in case.

Right side link with also an added image.



As you can see, the donor area was obtained from 2 separate, disjoint parts. I asked them to do it, and they agreed, as it *may* be a useful thing for doing the otherwise prohibitively difficult analysis.
So then, next I would look at the images above to see if I could locate every wound site on my donor in a set of pictures, which I shot only 5 weeks before my trip to the Netherlands:

Left side

Right side



So there you'll see all of those wound sites marked in the donor area, in its previously untouched state, since we will need to know where the supposed regeneration is expected to take place. It can be a bit tricky at first to get a sense of how the photos are connected, but by looking at the red borders, you know where one picture ends and another begins. Every wound site is represented here by a blue circle. Let's not bother with the other stuff yet.

After healing, at a few weeks most of the donor sites should be regenerating hair (according to dr. Gho). At 3 months, the donor is known to have regenerated all the hair it can. I waited almost an extra month (3 months and 3 weeks, to be exact) before shooting photos again of the donor area. Here are those photos:



Left side

Right side

(If the files are too big to preview, just click "download file". )


The red lines are the same as in the "before procedure"-pictures. I noted the results in an excel charts file:

Charts link

To make the chart a little easier to deal with, I composed a grid where all of our analyzed hair-units are divided into groups of 4 units, so you should find 4 circles (blue) inside almost every area of the grid (green). The excel chart lists how many hairs in total we saw in each group before the HASCI procedure, and how many hairs we saw after. For example, in group B15, we saw a total of 11 hairs before the procedure, and 9 hairs after, so that confirms 3 hairs lost in group B15.

Result
I could make observation of 4354 hairs appearing at before the procedure. I could verify no more than 3248 after-procedure. This means that, if one subtracts from the sites where there was more hairs after than before the procedure, we get the result of 4354 - 3248 + 137 = 1243 donor hairs lost.



RECIPIENT

Now, the recipient part is much more complicated to manage & count. To make the directest comparison on the recipient before the procedure, and after, one would rather have to leave tattoos on one's scalp. I shot very good pictures also of the recipient before the procedure, btw, but in my recipient analysis I got more benefit from use of the known wound sites.

Left recipient temple analysis

Right recipient temple analysis



The wound sites (green circles) are here labeled and we observe many angles to get a verification of 1461 hairs growing out in 859 wound sites in recipient. (HASCI said 801 grafts were won.) The number charts for each side are found at the right edges of the image files.


There are occurrances when previously existing hairs and the implanted hairs overlap into our result. Any hairs which grow very near to the wound sites may be mistaken as new hairs and interpreted as a positive result, even if they had existed there previously before the procedure. But we all want to know about the regeneration rate, don't we?



REGENERATION RATE


We must conclude that no more than 1461 recipient hairs were gained.
And we formerly already observed that 1243 donor hairs were lost.

The regeneration rate is not more than +17,5 %. (1461 divided with 1243 is always ~ 1,175.) With many tiny bruises, blood clots, and superficial wounds inflating the result, I'm surprised it's not even higher than 17,5 %. To go more specific, we'd have to become increasingly able to separate existing hairs and new hairs through the pictures which were taken before procedure.



All of this, my own doing, and I have received no assistance from anyone else in completing the effort.