Researchers at the University of Maryland Robotics Center have built a worm-like robot to remove brain tumors.
It’s no secret that brain surgery is hard. One of the biggest challenges to removing brain tumors is trying to separate cancerous tissue from healthy brain matter.
According to J. Marc Simard, a neurosurgery professor at Maryland, “When we’re operating [on brain tumors] in a conventional way, we get an MRI on a patient… and we use landmarks that can either be affixed to the scalp or are part of the skull to know where we are within the patient’s brain”.
However, once inside a patient’s skull, tumors often shift as a surgeon removes tissue during surgery. This makes it difficult for a physician to tell whether they’ve removed all of the cancerous tissue. To solve this problem, researchers at Maryland created a robotic device that can remove cancerous brain tissue more accurately.
