In-body ‘GPS’ developed by MIT could track tumours and deliver pills internally
Scientists believe they are on the verge of a new era of cancer treatment with a radio wave device as easy to swallow as a grain of rice
A GPS-like system developed by scientists at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology could help doctors locate medication or track tumours inside the human body, ushering in a new era of cancer treatment.
The system, ReMix, consists of an ingestible sensor, an external source of radio waves, and a special algorithm designed by researchers at MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory that captures the right signal and eliminates noises.
It can be used to obtain high resolution images and even deliver medication to precise locations inside the body, since the system can track the sensors with centimetre-level accuracy, researchers said at the SIGCOMM 2018 conference in Budapest, Hungary over the weekend.
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The study was conducted by MIT researchers Zhang Guo, Deepak Vasisht and Dina Katabi, professor Omid Abari at the University of Waterloo, physicist Hsiao-Ming Lu and technical director Jacob Flanz at the Massachusetts General Hospital.
SIGCOMM is an annual conference focused on the applications, technologies, architectures, and protocols for computer communication.
The sensor is made up of a microchip the size of a grain of rice that can be put into a capsule and swallowed by patients. It needs no battery since the sensor merely reflects the radio waves generated by an external device, reducing the size of the tracker and prolonging its function time, the study said.