How it began
Israeli engineer Gavriel Iddan began work in 1981 on a disposable camera the size of a pill that could be swallowed and pass through the intestine. According to the European Patent Office, he pioneered the idea of wireless capsule endoscopy in the mid 1990s, and in 1998 he co-founded the company Given Imaging to market his prototype. In 2001 the device was released, and the US Food and Drug Administration cleared the Given Diagnostic Imaging System that year.
Before it existed
Gastroscopes and colonoscopes let doctors examine roughly the upper 1.2 meters and the lower 1.8 meters of the digestive tract. The middle 6 meters, the small intestine, stayed hard to reach. X-rays and ultrasound could not give a direct view of it, and doctors at times had to resort to exploratory surgery, which was risky and uncomfortable for patients. These limits reduced the chances of detecting gastrointestinal disease early.
How it works
The PillCam SB capsule measures 11 by 26 millimeters and weighs 3.7 grams. It holds an imaging chip video camera, six LEDs, two silver-oxide batteries and a radio transmitter. The patient swallows it, and the natural contractions of the intestine carry it along until it is excreted. It transmits two images per second, about 50,000 in total over roughly eight hours, to sensors and a pager-sized recorder worn on the body. The patient can move around normally, and a doctor later reviews the downloaded images.
How it spread
By 2011 the European Patent Office reported that the PillCam SB had been used close to 1.5 million times in more than 5,000 medical facilities in more than 75 countries, and described capsule endoscopy as the standard for small bowel diagnostics. In 2010 Given Imaging sold 221,300 capsules. The company extended the line with capsules for the colon and the esophagus. Doctors used the capsule for Crohn disease, celiac disease, obscure intestinal bleeding and small bowel tumors.
