What if swallowing a pill with a camera could help doctors peer into your insides? Now researchers in the US have built a new camera that is designed to take high-quality, colour pictures in confined spaces.
The fundamentally new design has created a smaller endoscope that is more comfortable for the patient and cheaper to use than current technology.
Its first use on a human, scanning for early signs of oesophageal cancer, will be reported in an upcoming issue of IEEE Transactions on Biomedical Engineering.
"Our technology is completely different from what’s available now. This could be the foundation for the future of endoscopy," said lead author Eric Seibel, a University of Washington (UW) research associate professor of mechanical engineering.
An endoscope is a flexible camera that travels into the body’s cavities to directly investigate the digestive tract, colon or throat.
Most of today’s endoscopes capture the image using a traditional approach where each part of the camera captures a different section of the image. These tools are long, flexible cords about 9 mm wide, about the width of a human fingernail. Because the cord is so wide patients must be sedated during the scan.
The scanning endoscope developed at UW is fundamentally different. It consists of just a single optical fibre for illumination and six fibres for collecting light, all encased in a pill.
Seibel acted as the human volunteer in the first test of the UW device. He reports that it felt like swallowing a regular pill, and the tether, which is 1.4 mm wide, did not bother him.
Once swallowed, an electric current flowing through the UW endoscope causes the fibre to bounce back and forth. This allows the camera’s single eye, which sees only one pixel at a time, to combine all the information to create a high-resolution colour picture of the whole scene.
In the tested model, the fibre swings 5,000 times per second, creating 15 colour pictures per second.
A technician (right) inserts the miniature endoscope into a rolled-up world map. The tiny endoscope (top left) has its own light source for peering into dark spaces. And even though the camera’s single eye sees only one pixel of the image at a time, it combines all the information to create a high-resolution colour picture of a map (bottom left), or even a person’s digestive tract
|
smaller, Seibel said, but the researchers chose a size that would be easy to handle and swallow. Another disadvantage of wireless capsules is they only allow a single fly-by view. "You have no control over the other pill once it’s swallowed. It just flutters down," Seibel said. But since the UW scope is tethered, the doctor can move it up and down along the region of interest. "The next challenge is to make this cheaply," Seibel said. In the future the researchers hope to not only take pictures, but also deliver treatments through the device. |
The resolution is better than 100 microns, or more than 500 lines per inch.
Although conventional endoscopes produce images at higher resolution, the tethered-capsule endoscope is designed specifically for low-cost screening.
Using the scanning device is cheap because it is so small that it doesn’t require anaesthesia and sedation, which increase the cost of the traditional procedure.
"The procedure is so easy I could imagine it being done in a shopping mall," Seibel said.
The UW’s scanning fibre endoscope fits inside a standard pill capsule. The pill could be even
NO USER COMMENTED IN THIS POST