Health

A New Medical Device Revolutionizing the Detection of Internal Bleeding

By CBSNews.com staff CBSNews.com staff

January 31, 2002 / 8:43 AM EST / CBS

Medical researchers have developed a new diagnostic tool that may sound like it comes straight out of the movies. As Elizabeth Kaledin reports it's a tiny camera, taken orally.

Audray McGinness is being prepped for a fantastic voyage. It's a voyage that will take place inside her body. "You're going to put this on your tongue," says a nurse. A voyage that until now could only be imagined in a science fiction movie.

"Because of miniaturization it's become possible to put a camera, light source, batteries and transmitter all into a capsule that a patient can then swallow," says Dr. Blair Lewis, who is finishing up clinical tests on the capsule camera, a revolutionary new tool that pinpoints the source of internal bleeding. When all other conventional methods have failed.

New Jersey attorney Howard Popper was referred to Dr. Lewis after his 3rd episode of severe internal bleeding. "We had gone into his small intestine with standard instrumentation and had not found the cause," says Dr. Lewis.

But hours after Mr. Popper swallowed the capsule camera, Dr. Lewis was able to precisely locate the source of bleeding. "Here there is sort of a bulge, that's a tumor of the small intestine, it was very easy to spot, tumors and blood just suddenly appear."

Here's how it works: the capsule cam has it's own flash and takes two pictures a second. It travels effortlessly through the stomach into the small intestine, constantly beaming data to a hard drive the patient wears on a belt. The capsule itself is disposable, there is no need to retrieve it. After seven hours the data is transferred to a computer and converted into pictures.

In Mr. Popper's case the tumor turned out to be pre-cancerous. "The surgeon was able to locate it and remove it without any cancer setting in, and I believe the capsule camera saved my life."

The capsule camera could be approved for use as early as this spring. It is expected to cost four to five hundred dollars--less expensive and much less invasive than standard endoscopic exams. Elizabeth Kaledin, CBS News, New York.