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 – sometimes popularly referred to as Siamese twins – are twins joined in utero. A very rare phenomenon, the occurrence is estimated to range from 1 in 49,000 births to 1 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.
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 centimeters of brain. More than 1—2 centimeters 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 7th in the world by the QS World University Rankings 2022.
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 1969–2006.
Yarlagadda Nayudamma is a consultant paediatric surgeon from Guntur. Previously, he operated at the Guntur General Hospital where he was the head of the paediatric surgery department. He has performed various complex surgical procedures which have received acclamation from the scientific community and the lay public.
Gifted Hands: The Ben Carson Story or simply Gifted Hands is an autobiographical book about the success story of Dr. Ben Carson, a neurosurgeon and future politician, and his life going from a failing student to leading a team of surgeons in the first known separation of conjoined twins joined at the back of the head. Co-written by Ben Carson and Cecil Murphey, Gifted Hands was adapted into a film of the same name by director Thomas Carter in 2009. In the film, Dr. Carson was portrayed by actor Cuba Gooding Jr.
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 that 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; their 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 its 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.
Rahul Jandial, M.D., Ph.D. is an American, dual-trained brain surgeon and neuroscientist. He is also a Sunday Times bestselling author with his books translated to over 10 languages.
Anthony David Holmes AO is a plastic and reconstructive surgeon who trained in both Australia and the United States, and is qualified in both countries. His primary interest is facial reconstruction and he has developed several new procedures. 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. In 1990 he created the Children's Craniofacial Foundation of Australia which has subsequently been renamed The Jigsaw Foundation.
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.
Dr. Basant Kumar Misra is a neurosurgeon specialising in treating brain, spine, cerebrovascular and peripheral nervous system disorders, injuries, pathologies and malformations. He is the vice-president of the World Federation of Neurosurgical Societies, and the former President of the Asian Australasian Society of Neurological Surgeons, and the Neurological Society of India. He is a recipient of Dr. B. C. Roy Award, the highest medical honour in India.
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.
