Bhubaneswar: The separation of Jaga and Balia, first of its kind craniopagus surgery, which was led by eminent neurosurgeon Ashok Mohapatra found place in the 2020 edition of Limca Book of Records.
In a letter, the Limca said, “A team of 125 doctors and paramedical staff, led by Dr Deepak Kumar Gupta and Dr Ashok Kumar Mohapatra, from the Department of Neurosurgery at AIIMS, New Delhi, successfully separated 28-month-old twins Jaga and Balia. The twins were joined to each other at the cranium. The complex surgery was conducted in two stages, on 28 August 2017 and 25 October 2017.”
Reacting to the Limca records, Mahapatra said, “the facilities and expertise available at AIIMS in New Delhi made it possible.”
His colleague Prof. Deepak Kumar Gupta and a large number of doctors and paramedics toiled hard to separate the twins. One of the features of the surgery was that a vein taken from the vein bank at AIIMS was grafted in Balia’s brain as the children shared only one vein and it was the first such case of vein grafting in the world, he said.
Prof. Mahapatra further said that the team took advice from Prof. James T. Goodrich, a famous paediatric neurosurgeon at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine, Bronx, New York, and dine three dry runs before the real surgery.
Prof. Ashok Kumar Mohapatra completed MBBS from MKCG Medical College, Berhampur in 1975. He did M.S. (Surgery) from AIIMS, New Delhi in 1979 and M.Ch. (Neurosurgery) in 1982. He also passed out in DNB (Neurosurgery) from National Board of Examination in 1983. He served as the Director of Netaji Subhas Chandra Bose AIIMS in Bhubaneswar from 2012 till 2016. He was one of the founding Directors of AIIMS, BBSR.
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