ABSTRACT
A fantastic voyage In 1966 the film Fantastic Voyage showed a miniaturized team of doctors travelling through human blood vessels and making life-saving repairs in the brain of a patient. Fantasy became comedy in 1987 when Hollywood remade the film with the title Innerspace. By this time engineers in the real world had absorbed the inspiration wholeheartedly, but instead of miniaturizing themselves they began building pill-size robot equivalents that could travel through a person’s gastrointestinal tract. After another 13 years, in the year 2000, patients began swallowing the first commercially built pill cameras. Since that point in history, doctors have literally opened up new vistas of medical science using the capsules to obtain unprecedented sights of places in the human body, such as the inner folds of the small intestine, that are otherwise difficult to reach without surgery.
