A pair of conjoined twins who were joined at the head have been successfully separated after 27 hours of surgery in New York, US media reports say.
The 13-month-old boys, named Anias and Jadon, shared a 5-by-7-centimetre section of brain tissue, their mother Nicole McDonald wrote on Facebook.
The operation to separate their skulls took 16 hours alone, CNN reported. Further operations were then required to reconstruct their heads.
"Two separate babies!," McDonald wrote after the operation. "We are standing on the brink of the unknown. The next few months will be critical in terms of recovery and we will not know for sure how Anias and Jadon are recovering for many weeks."
As 80 per cent of conjoined twins who do not undergo separation surgery within the first two years of their lives die, the parents of twins faced an immensely difficult decision.
Conjoined births are extremely rare and are estimated to occur between one in 49,000 births and one in 189,000 births.
