Student Yamini Karanam, who is pursuing a doctorate at Indiana University in the USA, began to have difficulty recording the things she read for her thesis. She also couldn't understand anything she heard if two people were talking at the same time inside a room.

Knowing there was something very wrong going on, she went after several experts to find out what was causing her problem. However, none of them could make a diagnosis that explained the symptoms the doctoral student was experiencing.

Karanam then went on to do research on his own, and eventually found out about Dr. Hrayr Shahinian at the Skullbase Institute in Los Angeles. The doctor created a new method of brain surgery, much less invasive than traditional techniques. Under the neurosurgeon's supervision, she underwent new tests that diagnosed an alleged tumor in her brain's pineal gland that needed to be removed.

Innovative technique

The technique that Dr. Shahinian developed uses fiber optic technology and digital imaging to introduce and guide an endoscope through the patient's brain through an incision of just over an inch into the back of the skull. Once in place, the doctor uses the endoscope itself to gently separate the tumor from other brain tissues, making the least impact possible.

Quite different from traditional methods, which require the removal of part of the skull, the use of metal retractors to remove parts of the brain, which can cause even more damage and increase the risk of complications. But what the neurosurgeon found inside Yamini's head was very different from what he expected.

Yamini Karanam with Dr. Hrair Shahinian After Surgery - Image: NBC Los Angeles

Bad twin

Instead of a common tumor growing from the pineal gland, what he found was a teratoma - a tumor composed of embryonic tissue that did not develop properly, which had hair, bones and teeth. Basically, what caused the neurological problems the student had been experiencing was a “twin sister” she had carried inside her brain since before she was born.

Teratomas are tumors that are usually benign and form very rarely, and may appear in the testicles, ovaries, neck, tongue, under the tongue, skull and brain. Dr. Shahinian, who has performed between seven and eight thousand brain surgeries, said this was the second he saw throughout his career. When Karanam woke up after the procedure, he joked that the tumor was "the evil twin sister who tortured me for the past 26 years."

There was a risk that the teratoma was malignant, but pathologists performed tests that eliminated this possibility. The student is expected to recover completely from surgery within the next three weeks.

Via InAbstract