“LONDON — After emerging from a final risky surgery, Brazilian twin brothers Arthur and Bernardo Lima were met with an emotional outpouring of applause, cheers and tears from medical staff and family members”
“For the first time, the boys lay separated, face-to-face and holding hands in a shared hospital bed in Rio de Janeiro, after doctors there and almost 6,000 miles away in London worked together using virtual reality techniques to operate on the conjoined 3-year-olds.”
“The highly complex medical procedure separated the twins, who come from Roraima in rural northern Brazil and were born craniopagus, meaning they were connected to each other with fused skulls and intertwined brains that shared vital veins. Only 1 in 60,000 births result in conjoined twins, and even fewer are joined cranially.”
“Medical experts had called the surgery to separate the brothers impossible.”
“But medical staff from Rio’s Instituto Estadual do Cérebro Paulo Niemeyer worked with London-based surgeon Noor ul Owase Jeelani of Great Ormond Street Hospital to use advanced virtual reality technology to rehearse the painstaking procedure.”
“It involved detailed imaging of the boys’ brains including CT and MRI scans, as well as checks on the rest of their bodies. Health workers, engineers and others collated data to create 3D and virtual reality models of the twins’ brains to allow the teams to study their anatomy in greater detail.”