by Randal Chinnock
Slide 11 of 12
PREVIOUS SLIDE – – – NEXT SLIDE
I’ll close with a very well-known example: the “Pill Cam”, developed by Given Imaging and now a Covidien product.
The device is swallowed and transmits images as it makes its way from one end of the gut to the other.
The story that I’ve heard about how this was invented was that there was a surgeon in Israel who was lamenting to his neighbor that he had a patient who had persistent intestinal bleeding and he couldn’t diagnose it because he could reach that part of the bowel from either direction.
The neighbor, who developed tine cameras for drones for the Israeli military, said “I know how to solve that problem”.
In this case, disposability made sense since nobody wanted to recover these devices after use. So the decision was driven by a valid clinical consideration. Plus, there was no other way to do this imaging, so a high disposable cost was tolerated.