Visual servoing-based pneumatic hair transplantation mechanism for robotic FUE surgery

Abstract

Hair transplantation surgery is an effective solution for hair loss problems, among which follicle unit extraction (FUE) surgery is more widely used and favored. At present, most hair transplantation surgeries still rely heavily on manual operation by doctors and very few hair transplantation robots with complex structures have been introduced. This paper proposes a pneumatic hair transplantation mechanism for FUE surgery, equipped with a camera, capable of automatically performing both hair implantation and extraction with airflow. This pneumatic method eliminates the complex needle structure, has the function of temporarily storing the follicles inside the needle, thus facilitating the automation of transferring follicles from extraction to implantation. Then a visual feedback system is proposed to accurately position the follicles during the transplantation. The experimental results show that average distance deviation between the actual and target positions is 0.6128 mm and the average deviation of hair implantation depth is 1.7176 mm, which verify the feasibility of the proposed system.

Keywords

• Robotic hair transplantation
• Follicle unit extraction (FUE)
• Image-based visual servoing (IBVS)