A team of surgeons and other doctors have successfully separated conjoined twin girls from Uganda during a 16-hour-long operation at Nationwide Children's Hospital in Columbus, OH.
Acen and Apio Akello are 11 months old. They had been born joined at the pelvis and hip. They're expected to make a full recovery, according to a press release from the hospital.
The difficult surgery was done with the use of neurophysiologic monitoring which is the use of monitoring methods such as electromyography and electroencephalography to keep track of the functional integrity of the nerves and spinal cord. The two girls shared part of their spinal cord, which had to be separated carefully. Surgeons had to determine during surgery which muscles and nerves belonged to Acen and which belonged to Apio.
"This is the first time this specific type of monitoring has been done in a conjoined twins' separation surgery," Dr. Gail Besner, chief of Pediatric Surgery at the Nationwide Children's told Time magazine. Three-dimensional modeling was also used in the surgery, Dr. Besner said.
During the surgery, the girls were referred to as "blue" and "red" to eliminate confusion due to their similar names.
The girls flew from Uganda to Nationwide Children's in December, accompanied by their mother, Ester Akello. Four sets of conjoined twins have successfully been separated at the hospital since 1978. Earlier this year, they had a preliminary procedure to place tissue expanders under their skin. This would stretch the skin so that there would be enough to cover the areas that were separated.
Acen and Apio will require one more surgery, but the complex separation surgery, which was a bigger hurdle, has been deemed a success.
Conjoined twins occur in about 1 in 200,000 pregnancies, the hospital said.
A set of conjoined twins were born at Children's Hospital of Colorado in Denver in August and were surgically separated almost immediately. Hannah and Olivia McCullough were joined from the chest to the pelvis and shared a liver and other organs. Only Hannah McCullough survived the operation.
