It is found that ‘Capsule Endoscopy’, a procedure worthy of a scene in a futuristic movie, is less effective than Colonoscopy in detecting Lesions.

In ‘Capsule Endoscopy’, the patient swallows a vitamin-sized capsule containing a tiny wireless camera, and as the capsule travels through the digestive tract, it takes thousands of colour pictures that are transmitted to a recorder worn around the waist.

These images are then transferred to a computer with special software that strings the images together to create a video, which the doctor can then view to look for abnormalities within the digestive tract, particularly in the small intestine, an area that cannot be reached by more traditional endoscopy procedures.

The capsule also provides good visualisation of the colon but according to the European researchers, it isn’t as effective in detecting pre-cancerous colon lesions and cancer as conventional colonoscopy.

Dr. Andre Van Gossum, from Erasme University Hospital, Brussels, Belgium, and colleagues compared the two procedures in a multicenter study of 328 patients with known or suspected colon lesions.

Capsule endoscopy, using the PillCam COLON capsule manufactured by Given Imaging, was performed first, and then after the capsule was excreted, or at least 10 hours later, standard colonoscopy was performed. The researchers found that capsule endoscopy achieved a sensitivity rate of 64 per cent and a specificity of 84 per cent in detecting polyps at least 6mm in size. For identifying advanced polyps, rates were 73 and 79 per cent, respectively. The capsule’s sensitivity depended largely on the cleanliness of the colon.

Moreover, capsule endoscopy failed to detect malignancies in 5 of the 19 patients for whom colonoscopy identified.