New NIH Grant to Advance Joint UMD & UMB Brain Surgery Robot Development

ADELPHI, Md - A research team from the University of Maryland, College Park (UMD) and the University of Maryland, Baltimore (UMB) have been awarded a new $2 million grant from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) to continue developing a small robot that could one day be a huge aid to neurosurgeons in removing difficult-to-reach brain tumors. This NIH grant is one of the first awarded to a joint UMB and UMD research project under the collaboration between these two research powerhouses that is known as University of Maryland: MPowering the State.

Team members Jaydev P. Desai, PhD, associate professor of mechanical engineering at UMD, and Rao Gullapalli, MD, associate professor of diagnostic radiology and nuclear medicine, and J. Marc Simard, MD, professor of neurosurgery, both at the University of Maryland School of Medicine in Baltimore have developed their "Minimally Invasive Neurosurgical Intracranial Robot" (MINIR) prototype over a number of years and demonstrated its feasibility, supported in part by a previous NIH grant. The team has evaluated the device under continuous magnetic resonance imaging (MRI). According to the researchers, work done on the previous NIH grant helped to uncover next level challenges that are the basis of this new NIH project.

The NIH grant will enable the team to develop MINIR-II, a fully MRI-compatible robot and demonstrate its safety and effectiveness. To accomplish this, MINIR-II will need to be under the direct control of the physician, with targeting information obtained exclusively from real-time MRI that uses active targeting methods with sensors embedded within MINIR-II.

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October 24, 2012