A team of 16 surgeons and nurses successfully concluded 25 hours of delicate surgery Tuesday to separate twin Bangladeshi girls who had been joined at their heads, sharing blood vessels and brain tissue. It is too early to know whether the two-year-old girls, Trishna and Krishna, suffered any brain damage during the marathon operation – an outcome doctors said had a 50-50 chance. The girls will remain in an induced coma for monitoring for several days after the completion of the surgery. The medical team began the work Monday morning on separating the girls, who were brought to Australia as infants by an aid organization. “The teams managed to separate their brains and they are both very well,” Royal Children's Hospital chief Leo Donnan told reporters. “Now we have the long task of the reconstructive surgery, which will go on for many hours.” Plastic surgeons finished reconstructing the girls' skulls using a combination of their own skin, bone grafts and artificial materials about five hours after the separation surgery ended.
