New "Endoscope On a Pill"

ScienceDaily is reporting that a new form of endoscope developed at the University of Washington is more like swallowing a pill than the typical "massive" cable. The pill, complete with a 1.4 mm wide tether, contains a single optical fiber for illumination and six fibers for collecting light. "Once swallowed, an electric current flowing through the UW endoscope causes the fiber to bounce back and forth so that its lone electronic eye sees the whole scene, one pixel at a time. At the same time the fiber spins and its tip projects red, green and blue laser light. The image processing then combines all this information to create a two-dimensional color picture."

Comments

Pill allows use in remote locations

[WillAffleckUW]

In that you only need a trained clinician (say even a nurse) with training in the procedure, and could use this in any office, thus allowing screening in small towns as part of a visiting nurse program for screening, which would even further reduce the cost from the current device limitations that require anesthesia to use (which always has a risk).

Besides, say it got lost, the small filament size (1.4 mm) would allow it to exit through the digestive tract and be recollected.