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.Called MINIR (Minimally Invasive Neurosurgical Intracranial Robot), the worm-like robot can be manipulated by a pulley system once inside a patient’s skull. Upon arrival ath the tumor site, the robot can cauterize the cancerous tissue and suck it out of the brain.
Although the robot itself is fairly unique, what separates the Maryland technique from all other forms of brain surgery is that the robot can be used while a patient is undergoing an MRI. Because the MRI can map a tumor even as it shifts during surgery, the MINIR robot can effectively remove every ounce of cancerous tissue.
So far the MINIR system has only been tested on pigs and cadavers. In the coming months further tests will determine whether the robot can be used to operate on humans. If MINIR is eventually adopted by surgeons, safer, more effective brain tumor surgeries may be coming to a hospital near you.