Capsule endoscope is a miniaturized camera placed inside a capsule-shaped housing. When a patient swallows such a camera pill, the capsule endoscope travels along the patient's gastrointestinal tract and takes a series of pictures of the interior of the patient gastrointestinal tract. While the capsule endoscope passing through the patient's digestive system, the images taken would be simultaneously transmitted outside of the patient's body to a receiver, and then doctors use the image data for real-time medical examinations.
Capsule endoscopy not only has shown clear advantage in examining a patient's small intestine, where the areas or portions of the gastrointestinal tract are not readily accessible by traditional standard endoscopy techniques, but also demonstrate significant usefulness in examining regular organs like-stomach.
However, when examining a stomach, in order to fully examine an interior surface of the stomach, it normally requires a patient to empty the stomach first and drink a lot of water to expand the interior surface of a stomach. At the same time, water makes the residues in the stomach travel from one position to another. As a capsule navigate through stomach and adjust its pastures in the liquid or on the surface of the stomach, often in times, the capsule gather a residue on its end. If accidentally, the residue landed on the surface of an imaging device or a lighting unit is accidentally covered, then the images generated by capsule endoscope will not have much useful information.
Therefore there is need to either prevent the capsule to be covered by the residues or to easily remove the residue off from the surface of capsule without taking the capsule out from the interior of the stomach.