Doctors from Baylor College of Medicine and the Texas Children’s Hospital in Houston are now fine-tuning an experimental method of fetal operation to reverse the damage caused by this condition by operating on the fetus while still inside the uterus, but the uterus is outside the body, as reported from the operation room by the New York Times.

“Fetal surgery is one of the few operations with a 200 percent risk of mortality,” assisting surgeon Dr Oluyinka Olutoye told the New York Times in a second article.

A seen in the photograph above, pediatric neurosurgeons Dr William Whitehead and Dr Michael A Belfort led the complex 3-hour surgery on Lexi Royer, 28, and her unborn son.

"Closure of the spinal defect before birth reduces the risk of hydrocephalus and may improve motor function in select patients," Dr Robert Bollo, a pediatric neurosurgeon at Texas Children's Hospital and assistant professor of neurosurgery at Baylor College of Medicine said in a statement from 2012. "Fetal surgery is an exciting new tool in our multidisciplinary commitment to the life-long care of patients with spina bifida."