I found the story in the San Diego Union-Tribune about the capsule that photographs the intestinal tract:
(We still don't know that JMAR has anything to do with this.)
union-trib.com
Swallowed camera capsule gives
diagnostic tour of digestive tract
It would replace fiber-optic tube
By Joseph B. Verrengia
ASSOCIATED PRESS
May 25, 2000
Scientists have developed a medical exam that sounds like something out of
the sci-fi movie "Fantastic Voyage": The patient swallows a tiny camera that
yields a living-color tour of the digestive tract as it passes painlessly through
the body.
The inventors of the camera-in-a-capsule hope that someday it will replace
colonoscopies and other uncomfortable and even painful diagnostic
examinations in which a flexible fiber-optic tube is inserted in the rectum or
down the throat.
"The capsule transmits images painlessly from areas we've never been able to
see before," said a British gastroenterologist, Dr. Paul Swain of Royal London
Hospital, who directed the tests. "With endoscopy, you have to push wires
and cables inside the patients, and it actually hurts."
Other researchers agreed that wireless technology will be the next leap in
medical imaging and diagnostics.
But they said the capsule, at least in its current form, is too limited to replace
endoscopes, as the fiber-optic tubes are called.
It could be several years before the camera wins approval. The developers
plan the first human trials in the United States later this year.
"It's on the cutting edge," said Col. Peter McNally, who is at Evans Army
Community Hospital at Fort Carson, Colo., and is medical spokesman for the
American College of Gastroenterology. "It's fascinating, but you don't have
the flexibility with this camera to look around or go back. It's just whipping
by."
The digestive tract is a 30-foot network of organs that follows a coiled route
through the body. Endoscopes can view much of the system down through
the throat and up through the colon.
Endoscopy has become a routine hospital procedure to diagnose and treat
many digestive ailments, including colorectal cancer, the second-leading
cancer killer in the United States, with more than 56,000 deaths in 1999.
In March, "Today" show host Katie Couric invited millions of viewers to
share in her colonoscopy. After she drank a purgative, doctors snaked a
fiber-optic camera into a sedated and woozy Couric, examining several feet
of her large intestine for pre-cancerous growths.
However, remote parts of the small intestine are difficult to examine without
very long and uncomfortable equipment or exploratory surgery.
That inspired the capsule's development by Swain and Given Imaging, an
Israeli company.
The initial test results were published in the journal Nature. Ten healthy
volunteers swallowed the high-technology capsules, which are slightly larger
than an antibiotic and covered with a nondigestible coating.
One end of the capsule is fitted with a window for a light and a camera with a
fixed, wide-angle lens. Both are powered by a tiny battery. A transmitter
sends digital images to a belt-mounted receiver worn by the patient.
Apart from not eating before the exam, the patient can follow an everyday
schedule while the digestive tract's natural contractions sweep the capsule on
through within six hours. The capsule is not retrieved.
Afterward, the doctor downloads the images from the receiver and views
them on a computer screen.
"We're looking for pathologies -- abnormal blood vessels, small bowel
tumors, ulcers, lymphomas, abnormalities of the mucous lining," said Swain,
who also swallowed a capsule and viewed his own digestive tour.
Others were skeptical that the images would be sufficiently detailed, and they
raised concerns that the camera's view might be obscured by bubbly saliva or
green bile.
The capsule cannot be stopped or steered to collect close-up details of the
small intestine's millions of interior wrinkles, where ailments often occur.
Nor is the capsule fitted with surgical tools, as a conventional endoscope is, to
take biopsies, treat bleeding lesions or remove polyps.
Copyright 2000 Union-Tribune Publishing Co. |
