Skip Navigation

Search

Conjoined twin, from prenatal to postnatal.

[Left]: Fetal MRI (FIESTA sequence) shows twins joined from their lower chest to the pelvis, but truly fused and sharing a single abnormal pelvic region. Not shown, but there are 3 lower limbs - one of the twins only had a single lower extremity.

[Right]: Postnatal small bowel follow-through (SBFT). It was unclear initially whether the twins shared a single rectum or had their own rectum. Therefore, contrast was administered via nasogastric tube for the twin with the suspected nonfunctional rectum, and serial imaging was performed until it passed into what turned out to be a separate, functional, but small rectum/anus.

I do not know too much about conjoined twins - not my area of expertise, but the general forms to consider are the side of fusion: ventral (front to front), lateral (side to side), dorsal (back to back), or caudal (tail end to tail end). Within these first 3, there are subtypes depending on how far up the fusion goes (head, chest, abdomen/pelvis); by definition, the caudal version obviously is only a lower body fusion. Once this is derived, an additional classification is the number of upper and lower limbs.

0