Neurosurgery or neurological surgery, known in common parlance as brain surgery, is the medical specialty concerned with the surgical treatment of disorders which affect any portion of the nervous system including the brain, spinal cord and peripheral nervous system.
Conjoined twins, popularly referred to as Siamese twins, are twins joined in utero. It is a very rare phenomenon, estimated to occur in anywhere between one in 49,000 births to one in 189,000 births, with a somewhat higher incidence in Southwest Asia and Africa. Approximately half are stillborn, and an additional one-third die within 24 hours. Most live births are female, with a ratio of 3:1.
Keith Goh is a neurosurgeon from Singapore. Goh is known for his operations in separating conjoined twins with two known successful cases and a failed attempt in separating Ladan and Laleh Bijani.
Great Ormond Street Hospital is a children's hospital located in the Bloomsbury area of the London Borough of Camden, and a part of Great Ormond Street Hospital for Children NHS Foundation Trust.
Clarence and Carl Aguirre are former conjoined twins born in Manila. They were conjoined at the top of the head and shared 8 centimetres (3.1 in) of brain. More than 1–2 centimetres (0.4–0.8 in) will affect brain functionality in one or both of twins. Without separation, they were expected to live around 6–8 months.
UCL Medical School is the medical school of University College London (UCL) and is located in London, United Kingdom. The school provides a wide range of undergraduate and postgraduate medical education programmes and also has a medical education research unit and an education consultancy unit. It is internationally renowned and is currently ranked 6th in the world by the QS World University Rankings for Medicine 2024.
John A. Jane, Sr. was an American neurosurgeon, and Professor of Neurosurgery at the University of Virginia. He was Chairman of the Department of Neurosurgery at the University of Virginia from 1969 to 2006.
Yarlagadda Nayudamma is a consultant paediatric surgeon from Guntur, India. Previously, he operated at the Guntur General Hospital where he was the head of the paediatric surgery department.
Wirginia June Maixner is an Australian neurosurgeon and the director of neurosurgery at the Royal Children's Hospital in Melbourne, Australia. She is known for having performed the first auditory brainstem implant on a child in Australia in 2007, and later having separated the conjoined twins, Trishna and Krishna in 2009.
The UCL Great Ormond Street Institute of Child Health (ICH) is an academic department of the Faculty of Population Health Sciences of University College London (UCL) and is located in London, United Kingdom. It was founded in 1946 and together with its clinical partner Great Ormond Street Hospital (GOSH), forms the largest concentration of children's health research in Europe. In 1996 the Institute merged with University College London. Current research focusses on broad biomedical topics within child health, ranging from developmental biology, to genetics, to immunology and epidemiology.
Craniopagus twins are conjoined twins who are fused at the cranium. The union may occur on any portion of the cranium, but does not primarily involve either the face or the foramen magnum; the two brains are usually separate, but they may share some brain tissue. Conjoined twins are genetically identical and always share the same sex. The thorax and abdomen are separate and each twin has their own umbilicus and umbilical cord.
James Rutka is a Canadian neurosurgeon from Toronto, Canada. Rutka served as RS McLaughlin Professor and Chair of the Department of Surgery in the Faculty of Medicine at the University of Toronto from 2011 – 2022. He subspecializes in pediatric neurosurgery at The Hospital for Sick Children (SickKids), and is a Senior Scientist in the Research Institute at SickKids. His main clinical interests include the neurosurgical treatment of children with brain tumours and epilepsy. His research interests lie in the molecular biology of human brain tumours – specifically in the determination of the mechanisms by which brain tumours grow and invade. He is the Director of the Arthur and Sonia Labatt Brain Tumour Research Centre at SickKids, and Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of Neurosurgery.
Martin John Elliott is a British surgeon. He is presently Provost of Gresham College, taking over from Simon Thurley. Elliott was 37th Professor of Physic at Gresham College from 2014 to 2018, where he is also Emeritus Professor and Fellow. He delivered a series of free public lectures on The Heart of the Matter, "to explore [...] the challenging medical, ethical, financial and political issues of our time."
Anthony David Holmes AO is a plastic and reconstructive surgeon. His most high-profile surgery was in 2009 when he worked with a large team of experts to separate the Bangladeshi conjoined twins Trishna and Krishna.
Maria Bitner-Glindzicz was a British medical doctor, honorary consultant in clinical genetics at Great Ormond Street Hospital, and a professor of human and molecular genetics at the UCL Institute of Child Health. The hospital described her work as relating to the "genetic causes of deafness in children and therapies that she hoped would one day restore vision." She researched Norrie disease and Usher syndrome, working with charities including Sparks and the Norrie Disease Foundation, and was one of the first colleagues involved in the 100,000 Genomes Project at Genomics England.
Lewis Spitz is a paediatric surgeon who is internationally recognised as a leader in paediatric surgery and is known for his work on congenital abnormalities of the oesophagus, particularly oesophageal atresia, oesophageal replacement and gastroesophageal reflux especially in neurologically impaired children. He championed the plight of children with cerebral palsy and other congenital disorders; demonstrating that appropriate surgery could improve their quality of life. He is the leading authority in the management of conjoined twins and is recognised as the foremost international expert in this field. Spitz is the Emeritus Nuffield Professor of Paediatric Surgery.
James Tait Goodrich was an American neurosurgeon. He was the director of the Division of Pediatric Neurosurgery at Montefiore Health System and Professor of Clinical Neurological Surgery, Pediatrics, Plastic and Reconstructive Surgery at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine, and gained worldwide recognition for performing multiple successful separations of conjoined twins. He assisted in two craniopagus separations with Dr. Alferayan A in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, with the first one done May 5, 2014 and the second one done February 14, 2016. Both pairs were successfully separated and are doing well.
Nene Elsie Nwada Obianyo is a Nigerian paediatric surgeon, delegate from Nigeria to the World Federation of Associations of Paediatric Surgeons and one of the two Nigerian surgeons who first successfully separated conjoined twins in Nigeria at the University of Nigeria Teaching Hospital (UNTH) Enugu in 1988.
András Csókay, is a Hungarian neurosurgeon with international recognition in the field of neurosurgery for his development of a technique to enhance microsurgical precision in the vascular tunnel and for the separation of a pair of Bangladeshi (Islam) Craniopagus Twins.
Juliet Sekabunga Nalwanga is a physician from Uganda, who is the country's first female neurosurgeon. As of 2021, she was one of only thirteen neurosurgeons in Uganda. As of 2018, she was employed by Mulago National Referral Hospital in Kampala.
