Two-month old twin girls, who were joined at the abdomen and shared a common liver since birth have been separated after a complex surgery performed at a city hospital.
This is one of the rare pair of conjoined twins joined at the liver to be successfully separated, claimed the doctors.
Chief Liver Surgeon, Dr A S Soin of Medanta, who led a team of nearly 40 doctors to perform the surgery, said that the entire process was immensely challenging.
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"There was the fear of the unknown, there is no described anatomy of a liver that is shared between two humans, and no standard technique to split it. The separation of the common organ between the twins was fraught with the risk of bleeding and the danger of landing up with an inadequately functioning liver in one or even both babies.
"Here, we relied on our experience in bloodless liver surgery, and the sophisticated 3-dimensional scans to map the details before and during the operation. A minute error would have left things much worse," Soin explained.
Dr Neelam Mohan, Director of Pediatric Gastroenterology, Hepatology and Liver Transplant said that conjoined twins are rare, and occur once in 100,000 births, with 3 out of 4 cases being girls.
"Preparing the twins for surgery was a unique challenge too, as they always have been together, necessitating improvisations even for simple procedures like blood sampling, X rays and scans. Apart from the liver, it was important to rule out possible communications of the two hearts and the covering of the lungs and intestines as that would have changed the surgeon's plan completely," she said.
