Scientists have designed a pill with a tiny camera that can be easily used to detect early signs of esophageal cancer.

It has fundamentally created a smaller endoscope
that is more comfortable for the patient and cheaper to use than current
technology. The scanning endoscope developed consists of just a single optical
fiber for illumination and six fibers for collecting light, all encased in a
pill.

"Our technology is completely different from what’s available
now. This could be the foundation for the future of endoscopy," said Professor
Eric Seibel, the lead author of the research at the University of Washington.

"The procedure is so easy I could imagine it being done in a
shopping mall," said Seibel, who acted as the human volunteer in the first test
of the device.

He reports that it felt like swallowing a regular
pill, and the tether, which is 1.4 mm wide, did not bother him. "The next big
challenge is to make this cheaply," the ScienceDaily quoted Seibel as saying.

Its first use on a human, scanning for early signs of esophageal
cancer, will be reported in IEEE Transactions on Biomedical Engineering. In the
past 30 years diagnoses of esophageal cancer have more than tripled. The
esophagus is the section of digestive tract that moves food from the throat down
to the stomach.

However, people fail to undergo tests until it’s
progressed to cancer, a stage where the survival rate is less than 15%, because
internal scans are expensive.

Via Times of India