A team of seven surgeons in north India has successfully separated twins joined at the stomach who also shared some common organs in a seven-hour operation, Press TV reported.
Doctors specializing in various aspects of anatomy operated on the conjoined twins on Sunday at a hospital in Allahabad city in northern Uttar Pradesh.
The surgeons have said that the separated twins are now in the intensive care unit, the Associated Press reported.
"Some parts of their body were joined. They had a common liver, some common intestines, which needed to be separated. They had separate hearts, which were joined by thick veins, this was the most challenging aspect of the operation," Dinesh Agrahari, one of the surgeons of the team, told reporters after the successful operation.
Before the operation, the conjoined twins were kept in a government hospital for 10 months until they were strong enough to survive the surgery.
During that period, the team of doctors consulted surgeons in Taiwan and Singapore who had experience in such operations. They even had to borrow the equipment to do the operation.
Conjoined twins occur roughly once in every 50,000 births and few are born alive or live long.
For twins who undergo surgery, one or both often die after the operation, and the rate of survival beyond the age of two is just 20 percent.