Dr Oluyinka Olutoye
U.S.-based Nigerian surgeon, Dr Oluyinka Olutoye, is a pediatric surgeon and co-director of Texas Children’s Fetal Center. He impressed members of the medical community around the world after conducting a successful surgical operation on a 23-week-old fetus by taking her out of her mother’s womb, excising the tumor, before returning the baby inside the womb.
Olutoye decided to operate on the unborn baby girl after routine check-ups diagnosed that she had sacrococcygeal teratoma, a rare, often life-threatening condition that forms a malignant tumour at the base of a baby’s tailbone. Before Olutoye’s intervention, a number of doctors from different hospitals had told the baby’s mother that it was in her best interest to terminate the pregnancy.
