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Fantastic Voyage: Tiny Camera 'Pill' Explores Our 'Inner Space'
May 22, 2001 (Atlanta) -- In the sci-fi flicks Fantastic Voyage and Inner Space, miniaturized scientists explored the interior of the human body. Now, scientists have developed a tiny camera that can do the same. When swallowed, the 'wireless endoscopy capsule' transmits high-quality images to a video monitor, allowing doctors to see and diagnose obscure digestive tract disorders.
The researchers, led by Blair S. Lewis, MD, of New York's Mt. Sinai Medical Center, studied 21 patients with suspected small intestine bleeding. Each had already endured an extensive battery of unpleasant tests, but doctors could not make a definitive diagnosis. The available imaging tools could not reach far enough into the digestive tract to find the problem.
The current standard for diagnosing the source of intestinal bleeding is push enteroscopy, says researcher C. Paul Swain, MD, of The Royal London Hospital in England. In the procedure, which is performed with or without a sedative to relax the patient, a four-foot long tube outfitted with a tiny video camera is inserted down the throat, through the stomach and into the small bowel.
For this new procedure, after an overnight fast, each patient swallowed a capsule -- about the size of a grape -- and video was recorded for eight hours. "All but one patient, who described it as 'tolerable,' said that the capsule was 'easy' or 'very easy' to swallow," says Lewis, in a presentation Tuesday at the Digestive Disease Week conference held here.
The device then travels the digestive tract in the same manner, and at about the same speed, as food. "It's propelled by peristalsis -- the internal movement of the gut," says Swain. Once swallowed, he tells WebMD, "it whizzes down the esophagus, then hangs around in the stomach for about an hour."
It could have been made even smaller than it is, but the device was designed to travel the small intestine without flipping over, says Swain. "It fits really well, and takes two to three hours to pass through. Once it hits the colon, things slow down. It leaves the body within a few days," he says.
At the end of the line, so to speak, the disposable device is eliminated like any solid waste. For the sake of this experiment, however, patients retrieved the capsule and confirmed it had remained completely intact, although there is no reason to be concerned if the capsule breaks down, says Lewis.
Next, each patient underwent push enteroscopy, and the researchers compared the capsule images with the enteroscopy images, trying to pinpoint the source of bleeding.
"Enteroscopy looks only at the first half of the small intestine, but the capsule looks at the whole thing," says Lewis. While push enteroscopy images revealed the problem area in 30% of the patients, the capsule found the source of bleeding in 55% of patients. "Capsules are way better," he tells WebMD.
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