Doctors at a city hospital announced here on Tuesday that they had successfully performed a rare surgery for craniosynostosis, a complex skull disorder caused by premature fusion of sutures, on a six-month-old child last month.
A team of doctors at Fortis Hospital, Anandapur, operated on Sraboni Chatterjee, born with a deformed forehead and right eye larger than the left.
Explaining the medical condition of the child prior to the surgery, Dr. Amitabha Chanda, consultant neurosurgeon, said that instead of the child’s brain and skull growing together, the skull had stopped growing, resulting in high intracranial pressure that could have led to vision loss and other facial deformities.
The team performed the operation to relieve intracranial pressure and also corrected the deformity of the skull and the face in a five-hour-long surgery, he said.
“The craniofacial approach to the surgery has made it rare in this part of the country,” Dr. Chanda said, adding that the operation provided the child both neurological and aesthetical cure.
Srijon Mukherjee, consultant maxillofacial surgeon, said doctors had to fabricate real size 3D models of the cranial bones out of a CT scan to operate upon the child.
Other critical factors that they had to keep in mind were to keep the child warm and restrict blood loss during the surgery, he said.
“Even 100 cc of blood loss could have resulted in significant disturbance [during the surgery],” doctors said.
Moumita Chatterjee, the child’s mother, said that after being operated on in December 2012, her daughter has had no complications and her face now looks like any other child’s.
Stating that out of every 2,500 children, one suffers from craniosynostosis, Dr. Chanda expressed the hope that after the successful surgery, more parents would come forward for the treatment of their children suffering from this disorder.
