Investigating inside the human body often requires cutting open a patient or swallowing long tubes with built-in cameras. But what if physicians could get a better glimpse in a less expensive, invasive, and time-consuming manner?
A team from MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) led by Professor Dina Katabi is working on doing exactly that with an “in-body GPS" system dubbed ReMix. The new method can pinpoint the location of ingestible implants inside the body using low-power wireless signals. These implants could be used as tiny tracking devices on shifting tumors to help monitor their slight movements.
In animal tests, the team demonstrated that they can track the implants with centimeter-level accuracy. The team says that, one day, similar implants could be used to deliver drugs to specific regions in the body.
ReMix was developed in collaboration with researchers from Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH). The team describes the system in a paper that's being presented at this week's Association for Computing Machinery's Special Interest Group on Data Communications (SIGCOMM) conference in Budapest, Hungary.
According to news.mit.edu
