Swallow this camera to get the inside scoop

Have you ever seen the movie Fantastic Voyage? In this old 1966 flick, a submarine containing a team of scientists is shrunken to a size so small that they can navigate the blood stream in a human being. Imagine being able to get a view like that by swallowing a camera the size of a pill. That's exactly what researchers are describing with a new design for an even easier endoscope.

Pill camera are not new, but traditionally they are so uncomfortable that patients need to be sedated beforehand. This new design allows someone to swallow the camera and beam pictures back out of the mouth so easily that it could be done in a shopping mall. That's exactly how one professor described it.

Not only is it easier to engulf, but the procedure is cheaper too. This is good news, because esophageal cancer is rapidly growing in the US. Survival rates of progressed conditions are not very good, which stems from the difficulty in diagnosing it early enough. It all goes back to patients not being easily screened for Barrett's esophagus, the condition preceding cancer. Hopefully now they can rapidly deploy this new mechanism to catch cases quicker. Who knows, maybe treatment via this little pill is next!