Transcript:

Maybe you think nothing of swallowing an aspirin or two when a headache hits, but if your doctor advised it, could you handle swallowing a pill with a tiny camera in it? I'm Jim Metzner and this is the Pulse of the Planet, presented by DuPont. Cameras in pills have been tested successfully, and will be used by medical professionals in the near future. They capture images of a patient's gastrointestinal tract, pinpointing spots of internal bleeding, looking for evidence of ulcers and other disorders. In addition to the camera, this amazing pill contains a lighting system and a transmitter that will send images from inside the human body on to waiting television monitors. Gastroenterologist Paul Swain oversaw the first tests of this device, working with Given Imaging, the Israeli company that invented the camera in a pill.

"We've used the capsule camera in twenty volunteers so far, and the results have been really very good. So we've had good pictures from the stomach, good pictures from the esophagus. You can see the teeth and things like that. We've also got good images of the right side of the colon, so even from the very first -- now I was actually the first person ever to swallow one -- we got quite good pictures. The other thing that I probably better say is that the capsule is moved by what's called peristalsis -- this is the natural movement of the body. And so it's propelled by the fact that the gut insides continually squeezes and propels your food forwards. So we're exploiting that to move it. But it does move at the rate the peristalsis sets. We, at the moment, don't yet have a means of moving it backwards and forwards, so it catches the images that you get. We don't necessarily do a complete examination, but we probably are capturing up to 90 percent of what we want to see."

Pulse of the Planet is presented by DuPont, bringing you the miracles of science, with additional support provided by the National Science Foundation.