Fantastic Voyage: Almost A Reality

For centuries, man has known that if you can't find the source of the bleeding, it's unlikely that doctors will be able to do anything about the medical problem in question.

While technology in the past century has made it easier and easier to track down the source of internal bleeding, sometimes current methods still fail.

That's where a new device being tested by medical researchers at Mount Sinai Medical Center in New York City comes in.

CBS News Medical Correspondent Elizabeth Kaledin reports it's a new camera, so small the patient swallows it and then has the data from the camera beamed to a hard drive the patient wears on his or her belt.

Over a seven-hour period of time, the camera - which has a flash - takes two pictures a second.

The data it produces is only a few steps shy of what was envisioned in the 1966 sci-fi classic movie Fantastic Voyage, which looked ahead to a day when scientists could be shrunk down to cell-size, to journey through and investigate the human body and its ills.

There are no tubes and no wires in the real-life capsule cam - radio transmitters send the data to the hard drive.

Mount Sinai Medical Center researcher Dr. Blair Lewis, a specialist in endoscopic procedures to detect sources of bleeding, calls it the "capsule cam."

Clinical tests are continuing but nearing the finish line.

Howard Popper, a New Jersey attorney who went through two endoscopies and a colonoscopy before trying the capsule cam, is glad he got to be one of the test patients.

"We had gone into his small intestine with standard instrumentation and had not found the cause," recalls Lewis, who says the capsule cam pinpointed the source of the bleeding in just a matter of hours.

"The surgeon was able to locate it and remove it without any cancer setting in," says Popper. "I believe the capsule camera saved my life."

And now the big question: how do doctors get the camera back after they're finished collecting its observations?

They don't.

Researchers say there's no need to retrieve the capsule cam, which is both disposable and believed to be harmless to the human body.

© MMI Viacom Internet Services Inc. All Rights Reserved