A 14-hour rare liver graft transplant surgery was performed on a one-year-old girl from Saudi Arabia at Artemis Hospital in Sector 51 here. Baby Fatima (name changed) underwent the living donor liver transplant, where only 1 out of 8 portions of the liver was used to provide a new liver to her.
The surgery called Monosegment (Segment 3) living donor liver transplant is the first such case reported in Delhi-NCR, in which mono-segmented liver graft has been used, the hospital said.
“Apart from this, the use of bovine jugular vein in liver transplant has been reported for the first time in the world, to provide an inflow of blood to the newly transplanted liver as the baby was born with absence of bile ducts and under developed portal vein,” said a statement issued by the hospital.
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Managing the child during such a long surgery was a tedious and tricky task for the doctors.
Born as the third child to her parents, Fatima suffered from unusually prolonged and deep jaundice for months after her birth. Doctors in Saudi Arabia diagnosed her with a rare disease called biliary atresia which is found in 1 in 16,000 live births. The developments of bile ducts in such children are absent.
Fatima underwent biliary bypass surgery at a local hospital in Saudi Arabia before coming to India.
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