Camera Phones Plaza

I’ve watched a movie when I was little, about a group of doctors in a transport capsule which was minimized at microscopic dimensions t allow it to travel in the blood vessels of a man shot in the head.
The team of doctors in the capsule was injected with a syringe in the injured man and they have travelled along his body until they reached his head where the bullet was located, in order to take it out.




This is still science fiction but what researchers at the University of Washington have in mind to do is to become reality in the near future.
They have come up with the idea of constructing a tiny video capable camera with high definition which would be easily inserted in a pill for swallowing.
This camera would capture high quality color pictures in tight spaces and would have applicability also in the esophageal cancer research sector.

Eric Seibel, a University of Washington research associate professor of mechanical engineering says this will be the future of endoscopy and will be extremely helpful in medicine as in the past 30 years he esophageal cancer cases tripled in the US.

Unlike the existent endoscope which is flexible but requires the patients to be sedated during this operation because of the 9 mm wide cords, the new type of camera developed by the University of Washington has only one optical fiber for illumination and six fibers for collecting light, all introduced in a pill.

Eric Seibel offered s a volunteer for the tests and he says he felt like swallowing a normal pill.

After the pill arrives in the organism the electric current which flows through the endoscope bounces the fiber back and forth in order for the lone electronic eye to see the entire space.
As the fiber spins the tip projects red, green and blue laser light and the image processing starts to combine the data received to build a 2D color image.

To get the general big picture of the process, the fiber swings 5,000 times per second, creates 15 color pictures per second and the resolution is better than 100 microns.
The process doesn’t require anesthesia or sedation and is cheap.