Brain cancer is one of the most aggressive forms of cancer, and trying to find it is a very invasive and very painful process for patients.

Now, a group of doctors has developed a new method of detecting brain cancer.

Brain cancer's survival rate can be as low as 27 percent, so doctors are quick to cut into the tumor for a biopsy.

Now, Johns Hopkins is doing something different to diagnose drawing cerebrospinal fluid from the patient's back, and searching for abnormal chromosomes.

"If there's a cancer growing in the brain, there is a high probability that it's going to shed material into the water that's bathing it, goes down through your brain, into the spinal cord, at the base of the spine. The procedure typically lasts a few minutes," Johns Hopkins School of Medicine Professor of Neurosurgery Chetan Bettegowda said.

These chromosomal genetic misfires from the liquid biopsy are fed into an algorithm to identify cancerous and non-cancerous cells.

So far, the success rate is high and patients endure far less pain.

"One day, the goal is to be able to say for an individual that has a neurological problem, from a finding on a brain scan or an MRI scan, we would be able to do this minimally invasive test and say. We think there's a very high likelihood that there's a cancerous process," Bettegowda said.

And then treatment can begin. 

This cerebrospinal analysis can also be used to evaluate the treatment and how the cancer is responding. More clinical trials are planned for that objective.