Maggot-Like Robots to Aid in Brain Surgery

Neurosurgeons, scientists and engineers have joined hands to devise maggot-like robots capable of eating brain tumors and sucking out hard-to-reach cancerous cells.

This technology, in the making for the past four years, is spearheaded by J. Marc Simard, a neurosurgery professor at the University of Maryland School of Medicine in Baltimore along with his team. The robot is shaped like a finger and has multiple joints, which allows it move in a number of ways.

These robots will enable surgeons to probe deep into a patient's brain. The new robotic prototype will improve the accuracy of tissue removal. The robot can be remotely controlled when a patient is under a MRI scanner.

The robot, also called the brain bot, will be equipped with an electrocautery tool at its tip, which will heat and kill the tumors, sucking up the debris or the scattered remains of the destroyed tumor.

Simard was motivated to build such a device after he saw some plastic surgeons using maggots to remove dead injured tissues from a patient in a TV show.

"Here you had a natural system that recognized bad from good and good from bad," said Simard.

"In other words, the maggots removed all the bad stuff and left all the good stuff alone and they're really small. I thought, if you had something equivalent to that to remove a brain tumor that would be an absolute home run," he added.

It is difficult to cut out cancerous tissues from a brain and dangerous too .

This tumor removing robot will be able to shrink the size of the slit made while operating. Under MRI monitoring the robot will aid surgeons in keeping a track of the tumor boundaries right through the operation and avoid other tissues.

"When we're operating in a conventional way, we get an MRI on a patient before we do the surgery, 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," he said.

"But when the surgeon gets in there and starts to remove the tumor, the tissues shift around so that now the boundaries that were well-established when everything was in place don't exist anymore, and you're confronted once again with having to distinguish normal brain from tumor. This is very difficult for a surgeon using direct vision, but with MRI, the ability to discriminate tumor from non-tumor is much more powerful," he added.