NEW DELHI, Oct 3: US neurosurgeon Benjamin Carson, an expert on separating Siamese twins, has arrived in New Delhi to see if he can operate on a pair of 10-year-old Indian girls joined at the head, a hospital official said.
“He is currently examining the kids. All day tests are going to be conducted,” said Karan Thakur, spokesman for the private Apollo Hospital in Delhi where the girls from Bihar, Saba and Farah Shakeel, are being treated.
Carson, head of pediatric neurosurgery at Johns Hopkins Children’s Centre in Baltimore, Maryland, was called in after Sheikh Mohammad bin Zayed al Nahyan, crown prince of Abu Dhabi, agreed to pay for the treatment of the twins after reading of their plight.
Carson and his team would conduct a brain angiography on Saba and Farah to determine the extent to which they share a major vein that supplies blood to the brain, the hospital said.
Twins joined at the head, known in medical terms as craniopagus twins, are rare, occurring once in every two million live births, according to Johns Hopkins hospital, and among the most difficult to separate.
The hospital was expected to announce on Tuesday whether the operation would proceed or not.
Carson was the lead neurosurgeon of a 70-member team that successfully separated seven-month-old German twin boys in 1987. In 1997, he and a team of 50 doctors separated 11-month-old Zambian boys, both of whom survived.
The specialist was also a member of at least three other attempts to separate conjoined twins, including the unsuccessful 2003 operation on the 29-year-old Bijani twins from Iran.
Twins who are physically joined are often called “Siamese twins” after the performing brothers Chang and Eng, who were born in 1811 in Thailand, then called Siam, and often shown at public exhibitions.—AFP
