To ease the pain by traditional gastroscopy, Thailand's experts have access to technology that helps doctors look into any areas in gastrointestinal tract just by having patients swallow a capsule.

The new technology, released by local news network The Nation on Monday, called Gastrointestinal Wireless Capsule Endoscopy, is a new method of diagnosis that allows doctors to easily examine any abnormal symptoms by giving them images in all directions inside a patient's gastrointestinal pats, including small bowel, a part of the body that has so far been inaccessible.

As the small bowel, which is the longest portion of the intestinal tract, is located between the stomach and the large bowel, it's hard to reach with instruments introduced either by mouth or anus. Doctors therefore find it difficult to determine any abnormality with the organ, especially when it comes to gastrointestinal bleeding.

Pitulak Aswakul, a gastroenterology physician at Bangkok's Samitivej Sukumvit Hospital, said that instead of using an instrument for oral or anal passage, which usually cannot reach the small bowel, the new method was to use just a small capsule which is swallowed by the patient.

The capsule, 26 millimeters long and 11 millimeters wide, is equipped with a small camera that captures all images inside the patient's gastrointestinal tract.

With an eight-hour battery and a strong light source, the capsule, once swallowed, begins transmitting images of the inside of the oesophagus, stomach and small bowel to a wireless receiver worn by the patient.

Pitulak said the capsule normally takes two color pictures per second so during the eight hours of its life it captures 55,000 images in total.

All images, she was quoted by The Nation as saying, are sent directly in real time to the receiver and then after the image- capturing process is complete, doctors load them into a computer to view in detail as the capsule is passes through the intestine.

"This process, which takes around two hours, will help us look for abnormalities inside the small bowel. The screen makes it very easy for us to examine possible sources of bleeding," she said.

Samitivej Sukumvit Hospital has had this technology for three years. A capsule costs 30,000 baht (about 850 U.S. dollars) and is for one-time use only, with no side effects on the patient as it exits the body through the normal excretion system.

Pitulak said the total cost to access this diagnosis method was over 40,000 (about 1,130 U.S. dollars), but not all patients who had a problem with the digestive system would be examined this way.

Source: Xinhua