Imagine a tiny snake robot crawling through your body, helping a surgeon identify diseases and perform operations. It's not a science fiction. Scientists and doctors are using the creeping metallic tools to perform surgery on hearts, prostate, and other organs. The snackbots carry tiny camera's scissors and forceps, and even more advanced sensors are in the works. For now, they're powered by tethers that humans control. But experts say the day is coming when some robots will roam the body on their own. "It won't be very long before we have robots that are nanobots, meaning, they will actually be inside the body without tether," the cardiac surgery chief at New York-Presbyterian Hospital and Columbia University Medical Center, Dr Michael Argenziano said. Dr Argenziano was involved with some of the first US Food and Drug Administration clinical trails on robotic heart surgery more than 10 years ago. Now he says snake robots have become a commonly used tool that gives surgeons a whole new perspective. "It's like the ability to have little hands inside the patients, as if a surgeon had been shrunken, and was working on the heart valve," he said. However Dr Argenziano and experts in robotics say the new creations work best when they're designed for very specific tasks "The robot is a tool. It is no different from a scalpel in that sense. It's really a master-slave device," he said "... as if the surgeon had been shrunken" (Paragraph 3). The underlined word is associated with ....

Question

Imagine a tiny snake robot crawling through your body, helping a surgeon identify diseases and perform operations. It's not a science fiction. Scientists and doctors are using the creeping metallic tools to perform surgery on hearts, prostate, and other organs. The snackbots carry tiny camera's scissors and forceps, and even more advanced sensors are in the works. For now, they're powered by tethers that humans control. But experts say the day is coming when some robots will roam the body on their own.

"It won't be very long before we have robots that are nanobots, meaning, they will actually be inside the body without tether," the cardiac surgery chief at New York-Presbyterian Hospital and Columbia University Medical Center, Dr Michael Argenziano said.

Dr Argenziano was involved with some of the first US Food and Drug Administration clinical trails on robotic heart surgery more than 10 years ago. Now he says snake robots have become a commonly used tool that gives surgeons a whole new perspective. "It's like the ability to have little hands inside the patients, as if a surgeon had been shrunken, and was working on the heart valve," he said. However Dr Argenziano and experts in robotics say the new creations work best when they're designed for very specific tasks "The robot is a tool. It is no different from a scalpel in that sense. It's really a master-slave device," he said

"... as if the surgeon had been shrunken" (Paragraph 3).

The underlined word is associated with ....