New Camera Pill Records Your Insides at 18fps

Have you ever wondered what it’s like to be a pill travelling through a human being? If the answer to this is yes, you need not wonder any more. The journey can be recorded by the new Pillcam, a tiny camera fitted with a flashing LED and a photo capture rate of 18 per second and measuring a tiny 11mm by 26mm.

The pill is designed to find abnormalities inside the human body that traditional techniques can’t and travels the same route as your food. It means doctors and nurses can see more of the internal organs, picking up problems that external scans may not find. Dr Salil Singh, a consultant gastro-enterologist who introduced capsule endoscopy to the Royal Bolton Hospital, said “There is a huge amount we are not able to see with a usual endoscopy and most people find it fascinating. This really was science fiction 20 years ago but now it’s a reality.”

While body parts such as the oesophagus, stomach and large bowel can be successfully scanned using traditional equipment, other organs such as the intestines and small bowel are not accessible with an endoscope.

Once the patient has swallowed the Pillcam, which by the way only are used once, it travels all the way through the body in a matter of hours. The patient wears a belt that receives and stores the images to help identify conditions such as coeliac disease and Crohn’s Disease.

The capsule endoscopy costs around £500 a time and it is available at a handful of hospitals in the UK including Bolton, Wythenshawe and Neath Port Talbot. Brenda Dalton, a nurse endoscopist at the Royal Bolton, added “You can tell patients find it a fascinating experience. This equipment enables to look at parts of the anatomy we are not able to access very easily.”

I will spare you the video and images here, but if you got the stomach for it, follow the link and watch the internals here.

Thank you Daily Mail for providing us with this information.

Images courtesy of Daily Mail.