What do my insides look like?

Did you think that camcorders were small enough to fit snugly into the palm of your hand? Read on! Doctors working at hospitals in the USA, England and Australia have been using a tiny video camera that fits snugly into a paracetamol-sized capsule! A patient simply swallows the pill – that is, the camera – and away it goes, snap, snap, snapping shots of your insides and taking the same trip down your insides as food does. Approximately seven hours later, the pill-cam is excreted and that’s the end of it. Being designed for one-use only, there’s no need to fish it out after its trip through your insides!

From entrance to exit

The camera-in-a-pill capsule, or pill-cam, measures 2.5cm by 1.1cm and contains a minuscule digital camera, a light source, and of course a battery to power it up. However, the real genius of the pill-cam lies in its tiny radio transmitter and antenna (also contained in the capsule!) which enables it to transmit data (pictures!) to a data recorder that the patient wears strapped around the waist. From the moment it is swallowed it takes pictures at a rate of two shots every second, right up until the moment it is excreted.

Solving a mystery illness

Tony Hulatt (name changed to respect privacy), a 19-year-old university student was one of the first people in Australia to benefit from using pill-cam technology. Tony had been suffering abdominal pain, anaemia, and bleeding from the bowel for over eighteen months, and had undergone numerous intrusive tests in hospital. Yet none of these tests had been able to identify his mystery illness.

Intrusive tests

Like other patients with these symptoms, Tony had undergone an endoscopy – an intrusive procedure in which doctors pass a tube down the throat and into the gut to try and see what might be wrong. Tony was also subjected to a colonoscopy, which does the same thing but tries to take a look from the other direction! Neither of these tests could identify his problem.

We didn’t go far enough …

Gastroenterologists, who analysed the pill cam footage taken from Tony’s pill-cam, said that the problem lay in getting pictures of the small intestine which is about six metres long and lies between the stomach and the large intestine. This makes it really difficult to get clear view of it using a long tube.

Swallowing a pill – less painful than surgery

Problem solved!

In Tony’s case the pictures taken by the pill-cam revealed that he had several large ulcers in his small intestine, which explained the pain, the bleeding and his anaemia. With the discovery of what exactly was causing his illness, Tony could stop further painful testing procedures and begin to be treated for his illness – a treatment which thankfully will not involve undergoing a major operation!

So much more to be done . . .

Like any new discovery, the pill-cam has not yet been perfected and there’s much room for improvement. At the moment, the pill-cam is great at identifying a problem, but is unable to estimate its exact position in the body. One of the areas being researched right now involves finding out how to pinpoint the exact location of a problem.

Some amazing facts about the pill-cam

The pill-cam ‘capsule’ is about the same size as a large multi-vitamin tablet, i.e. 2.5cm x 1cm