Melbourne, Nov 9 : Surgeons in Australia on Friday began a complex operation to separate 15-month-old Bhutanese conjoined twins Nima and Dawa Pelden.
The girls are joined at the torso and share a liver and possibly a bowel, their doctor said, adding "our challenge will be to reconstruct their abdominal walls to close it over", the BBC reported.
"What we will be looking for is simply what bits actually connect the two girls together," lead surgeon Joe Crameri told reporters on Friday.
He said they would separate the liver, but there was one "unknown" --whether the girls shared a bowel. If it was, it would also be divided, he said.
Their mother was feeling "a little bit scared" about the procedure, but had shown "extraordinary calmness" so far, the BBC quoted Elizabeth Lodge from the charity as saying.
Conjoined twins are very rare -- it is thought one in every 200,000 births -- and around 40-60 per cent of these births are delivered stillborn.
In 2009, the same hospital performed a successful operation to separate Bangladeshi conjoined twins -- Trishna and Krishna, who were joined at the head. They underwent a life-saving 32-hour long surgery.