Brain surgery is a dicey business. Even the most experienced surgeons can damage healthy tissue while trying to root out tumors deep inside the brain.

Researchers from the University of Maryland are working on a solution, and it sounds like something out of a sci-fi movie. They're developing a tiny, maggot-like robot that can crawl into brains and zap tumors from within.

The idea first came to Dr. J. Marc Simard, a neurosurgeon and professor at the University of Maryland School of Medicine in Baltimore, while he was watching TV.

He saw plastic surgeons use sterile maggots to remove damaged tissue from a patient. "It sounds strange, but it's a real thing," Simard says. And that's when he had the idea. "If I could train maggots to resect brain tumors I would," he says. "I can't do that, so robotic maggots are the next best thing."

He teamed up with Jaydev Desai, a roboticist at the University of Maryland in College Park, and radiologist Rao Gullapalli to create a working prototype. They call it MINIR — Minimally Invasive Neurosurgical Intracranial Robot. The wormy, multijointed prototype is about a half-inch wide, which Simard says is half as the size of tools he uses now.

Read full article in NPR