Surgeons are celebrating after successfully separating conjoined twins fused at the head.
The twin girls, named Minal and Mirha, were born in Pakistan last year, sharing vital blood vessels and brain tissue that made a separation operation extremely high risk.
Despite possible complications, the marathon 14-hour procedure was pulled off by UK neurosurgeon Professor Noor ul Owase Jeelani and his team at the Ankara Bilkent City Hospital in Turkey on July 19.
Now, exactly two months on, Minal and Mirha are almost ready to leave the hospital and return home.
“They’re making an excellent recovery, really wonderful,” Professor Jeelani told Sky News. “They should be in a position to go back to Pakistan in a few weeks.”
Jeelani and his fellow surgeons used Mixed Reality (MR) technology to help with the separation of the one-year-old girls, who were known medically as “craniopagus twins.”
MR technology combines 3D images with the physical world and “is used to increase precision during complex operations,” per Sky News.
A 3D model of the twins’ heads was created with the help of MR technology so that the medics could rehearse the surgery before it actually took place.
“The technology developed to undertake this work makes a lot of the more routine surgeries we do, safer, less invasive and more effective,” Jeelani explained.
The team also completed a successful smaller surgery on the twins before the final 14-hour separation operation on July 14.
“To be able to give these girls and their family a new future where they can live independently and enjoy their childhood is a special privilege,” Jeelani excitedly stated.
This isn’t the first high-risk separation surgery the British neurosurgeon has completed.
Back in 2022, he led a 27-hour operation involving more than 100 medics corresponding via virtual-reality headsets in two different countries.
The operation was performed on 3-year-old twins, Bernardo and Arthur Lima, who were also born with fused brain tissue.
As in the case of Minal and Mirha’s separation surgery, Jeelani used virtual reality technology to help prepare for the procedure.
“It’s really great to see the anatomy and do the surgery before you actually put the children at any risk,” Jeelani said at the time. “You can imagine how reassuring that is for the surgeons.”