Camera in a Pill Shows Promise

April 19 -- Sharon Dunn, who had been suffering from severe abdominal pain and mysterious internal bleeding for more than a year, was at her wits' end about what to do.

After undergoing nearly a dozen tests, including a variety of invasive diagnostic procedures, doctors could not find the cause. With a demanding job as a flight attendant, and a young daughter to take care of, Dunn considered her symptoms to be stress-related.

But then she swallowed a pill-sized diagnostic device equipped with a tiny videocamera. The camera quickly picked up the problem — and, Dunn says, saved her life.

New Diagnostic Test

The camera test was administered by Dr. Blair Lewis, a gastroenterologist at Mt. Sinai Hospital in New York. Lewis, who specializes in disorders of the small intestine, was contacted a few years ago by Given Imaging, an Israeli-based company that had developed the pill-sized camera and was testing it.

Initially, Lewis was very skeptical that a tiny camera could live up to all the hype.

"It seemed sort of far-fetched that pictures could be transmitted out of the body," he remembers. "That there could be a capsule small enough that people could swallow."

At the time, doctors were already using miniature cameras at the end of fiber-optic tubes that were inserted into the digestive system from above or below. But those cameras could not reach one part of the digestive system: the small intestine, a narrow, 21-foot-long tube connecting the stomach to the large intestine or colon. The new device, known formally as the Given Diagnostic Imaging System, was so small it could even pass through the small intestine.

As the device passes through the digestive system, it takes two pictures every second, transmitting them wirelessly to a receiver pack that the patient wears like a belt. During the eight-hour voyage through the digestive tract, the camera transmits around 50,000 images.

Lewis explains that the vitamin-sized pill is packed with more than just promise.