Next Cafe Sci Monday 6 March

[Café Scientifique]

Cafe Scientifique, Sheffield

Fantastic voyage: swallowing pill cameras to explore the human body

6 March 2016

7.00 Showroom

 

The introduction of endoscopy (long, flexible, fibreoptic instruments) to look into the gastrointestinal tract revolutionised practice, allowing doctors to diagnose, monitor and treat diseases more precisely and without resorting to surgery. But it is invasive, embarrassing, often requires intravenous sedation, time off work and carries small risks.

 

They are amongst the most common hospital out-patient tests. Up to 1% of the population per year have a gastroscopy (looking through the mouth into the stomach) and over half this number have colonoscopy (looking up the bottom and around they large bowel). This is increasing since the introduction of the Bowel Cancer Screening Programme in which everyone is invited to participate at the age of 55 years.

 

These tests might be better accepted if there was a significant chance of finding something important, but most of the time the test is normal, or finds something irrelevant. We need a patient-friendly, non-invasive test to select the minority of patients who need conventional endoscopy to obtain a biopsy (a sample of the stomach or bowel lining to be studied under a microscope) or remove a small polyp, or growth, for example.

 

The capsule endoscope is a swallowable pill camera. It was first developed to image the small bowel, which is between the stomach and large bowel (or colon). The colon is a bigger tubular structure than the small bowel, and contains lots of folds, but the invention of a double ended camera capsule (taking simultaneous forward and backward photos) allowed capsule examination of the colon. The stomach has an unusual shape and is more capacious still, hence the idea of a magnetic capsule which can be steered around all areas of the stomach by a joystick-controlled (like a games console) robot magnet…

Coming to Sheffield shortly! Clinical trials are about to commence

Dr Mark McAlindon is a Consultant Gastroenterologist at Sheffield Teaching Hospitals NHS Trust. He trained in Nottingham, where he was a British Digestive Foundation Research Training Fellow, Stoke-on-Trent and Melbourne, Australia. With colleagues, he developed the Sheffield Small Bowel Service, the largest in the UK, which has won a British Medical Journal award (runner up) for developing a small bowel service (2016), a Medipex award for innovation (2015), a Health Service Journal award (runner up) for innovation in care integration (2012) and a Movetis Magic award for optimizing novel technology of small bowel endoscopy (2011). He is a member of the British and European Societies of Gastroenterology endoscopy committees. He co-edited the Handbook of Capsule Endoscopy (Springer 2014). His main research interests are how to use swallowable pill cameras (capsule endoscopy) to investigate gastrointestinal symptoms. He has established industry and academic contacts in China and is installing a large robot magnet system to control the movement of capsules around the stomach using joysticks, the first such system outside of China.

 

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