Comparison of spiral and non-spiral wireless capsule endoscope's movements in porcine intestine

So far, driving wireless capsule endoscope(WCE) in the intestine forward from the outside of the body is challenging due to its soft, winding and smooth properties. A potential approach to propelling WCE forward is rotating it by magnetic fields. To investigate WCE's efficiency of translational movement when it was rotating, nine capsules mounted spirals with different diameters and lead angles were fabricated, for comparison, one capsule with no spiral was also mocked up. A small hand-held equipment was designed to generate rotational magnetic fields for rotating mocked capsules. Experiments show that the rotational speeds of the capsules with both spirals and non-spirals highly match with that of the magnetic fields. And experiments also demonstrate that spiral can efficiently improve the translational speed of the capsule in the porcine small intestine, which suggests that the capsule with spiral is a better choice in real maneuvering from the efficiency of WCE's translational speed.