Camera Pills
Health seems is going hi-tech, thanks to scientists who have now developed camera pills and ultra-sound creating maps, which they claim to facilitate accurate surgery without causing stress to patients.
An international team has created a new IT-based window on the inside of the body, which makes a patient transparent on a screen when a surgeon inserts instruments via small openings in the abdominal wall.
What the system actually does is transform X-ray and nuclear magnetic resonance (MR) images into three-dimensional maps which the surgeon can navigate when he performs surgery in the abdominal cavity.
Moreover, the system provides information that enables the surgeon to avoid blood vessels and other vital organs while operating through small openings in the abdominal wall. According to the scientists, the technique enables the surgeon to select a more lenient keyhole approach in operations that otherwise demand large, open interventions, thereby putting less stress on the patient’s body.
“With a better view of vital organs, a surgeon can perform keyhole surgery with an extra high margin of safety, and can employ keyhole surgery more often than before to remove tumours in organs that would not otherwise be easily accessible to keyhole interventions,” said lead scientist Thomas Lange of SINTEF in the Netherlands.
