University of Washington

The UW's scanning fiber endoscope fits in a pill that can be comfortably swallowed. The casing measures 6 millimeters wide and 18 millimeters long.

SEATTLE -- Imaging swallowing pill that literally shows you whether you are at risk for getting cancer.

University of Washington researchers are using that thinking to search for the warning signs of esophageal cancer, which they say is the fastest growing cancer in the United States.

The pill is actually called a tethered-capsule-endoscope – a flexible camera that can travel through the body - but it's very small and less invasive than its traditional, larger counterpart.

"Our technology is completely different from what's available now. This could be the foundation for the future of endoscopy," said lead author Eric Seibel.

Diagnoses of esophageal cancer have more than tripled in the past 30 years.  It usually follows a condition called Barrett's esophagus. But due to the expense of internal scans, most people don't find out they have the condition until it becomes cancer.

University of Washington

A technician inserts the miniature endoscope into a rolled-up world map. The endoscope has its own light source for peering into dark spaces. And even though the camera's single eye sees only one pixel of the image at a time, it combines all the information to create a high-resolution color picture of a map, or even a person's digestive tract.

"These are needless deaths," Seibel said. "Any screen that detected whether you had a treatable condition before it had turned into cancer would save lives."

A traditional endoscope has long, flexible cords that are about as wide as your fingernail.  Because of that, patients must be sedated during the scan.  The scanning endoscope has all the scanning devices inside a pill-sized device, while the cord that connects it is about one-sixth the size of the larger endoscope.  As a result, patients don't need to be sedated, ultimately saving money.

The test model takes 15 color pictures per second.  Larger endoscopes have higher resolution, but the tethered-capsule endoscope is designed specifically for low-cost screening.

University of Washington

This is the image of the map produced by the endoscope. The devices records 15 color images per second with a resolution of more than 500 lines per inch.

"The procedure is so easy I could imagine it being done in a shopping mall," Seibel said.

The first use on a human will be reported in an upcoming issue of IEEE Transactions on Biomedical Engineering.