Two little girls who were joined at the chest and abdomen were separated in a marathon surgery that lasted 26 hours at Texas Children's Hospital in Houston. The girls, Knatalye Hope Mata and Adeline Faith Mata, shared a liver, diaphragm, pelvis, intestines, and the pericardium, the membrane that covers their hearts.
The surgery involved a team of 50 medical professionals, including pediatric surgeons, reconstructive plastic surgeons, cardiovascular surgeons, orthopedic surgeons, urologists, pediatric gynecologists, and liver transplant experts.
Before the operation, the surgical team created three-dimensional models of the organs involved and practiced simulations of the surgery. The surgeons worked in teams each within their own specialty and worked in the operating room in stages. Each step of the surgery had to be choreographed to ensure that the different procedures were done in the right order and that surgeons did not get in each other's way.
Knatalye and Adeline, who were born in April 2014 were officially separated 18 hours after the surgery began. Surgery on Knatalye lasted another 5 hours after the separation, while surgery on Adeline lasted another 8 hours.
Conjoined twins have been separated before, but separating Knatalye and Adeline was one of the most complicated separation surgeries every attempted. The girls shared several vital organ systems that had to be parted from each other and then rebuilt within each of them.
Conjoined twins occur about once in every 200,000 births. Most do not survive. Up to 60% of conjoined twins are stillborn and about 35% live only one day, according to the University of Maryland Medical Center. The success rate of separation surgery depends on whether the twins share important organs and, if they do, how deeply connected those organs are.
Conjoined twins are often called Siamese twins, after Chang and Eng Bunker, a set of twins joined at the chest who were born in what is present-day Thailand and who toured with P.T. Barnum in the 1800s.