Enabling active locomotion and advanced features in capsule endoscopy

Abstract

[eng] The significant development in medical diagnostics and imaging has brought up a lot of new wireless capsule endoscopes coming to health care market. The capsule has been able to minimize patient discomfort and pain during digestive tract screening with less risk of infection and harmless to body organs. This kind of medical procedure is less invasive and gives a great impact compared to the traditional method. Although pill-shaped capsules have existed for over 11 years by now and are currently being used successfully in medical screening to study the GI tract, these systems are passive and are dependent to the peristaltic movement of the gastric wall to propel. The aim of this work is to provide the electronics needed to control an endoscopic capsule robot and the electronics needed to enable active locomotion and advanced vision functions (like autofocus). Enabling such functions the capsules will be able to perform screening, diagnosis and therapy. Such capsule robot has been designed in the framework of the “Versatile Endoscopic Capsule for Gastrointestinal Tumour Recognition and Therapy” (VECTOR) project. This project pursues the goal of realizing smart pill technologies and applications for gastrointestinal (GI) diagnosis and therapy. The overall medical goal of the project is to enable medical devices through advanced technology that can dramatically improve early detection and treatment of GI early cancers and cancer precursors. The main technological objective of the project is the take-up of microsystems and sub-components and their integration into robotic, mobile pill devices for useful and large impact applications in the medical field.