Minal and Mirha were born in Pakistan sharing something far deeper than childhood: blood vessels and brain tissue. They were craniopagus twins, joined at the head, and separating them meant walking a surgical tightrope where any mistake could cost them their lives.
The British neurosurgeon Noor ul Owase Jeelani led a team at Bilkent City Hospital in Ankara, Turkey, that dared to try. Before the big day, they used mixed reality technology to build a 3D model of the girls’ heads and rehearse every step of the procedure without yet putting the real patients at risk. On July 19, after a minor prior surgery, the decisive moment arrived: 14 hours of surgery that would define the rest of their lives.
Two months later, Minal and Mirha are recovering “extremely well”, Jeelani said, and in a few weeks they will return to Pakistan to grow up, for the first time, separately. This is not the first time this surgeon has achieved something like this: in 2022, he did the same with Brazilian twins Bernardo and Arthur Lima, in a 27-hour marathon involving more than 100 doctors connected from different countries.
