New wireless system help track tumours, help dispense drugs

A new "in-body GPS" system has been developed by a team of researchers, including an Indian origin scientist, that helps pinpoint the location of the ingestible implants inside the body using low power signals, according to a report by IANS.

The report says, researchers from Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) led by professor Dina Katabi developed "ReMix" system that, in animal tests, demonstrated that it can track implants with centimetre-level accuracy. Furthermore, doctors can implant sensors in the future to track tumours or dispense drugs with the help of this newly developed non-invasive wireless system, the team hoped.

"We want a model that's technically feasible while still complex enough to accurately represent the human body," said Deepak Vasisht, lead author on the new paper.

"If we want to use this technology on actual cancer patients one day, it will have to come from better modelling a person's physical structure," he added. The team further asserts that such type of systems might help aid more widespread adoption of proton therapy centres.

"One reason that (proton therapy)is so expensive is because of the cost of installing the hardware," said Vasisht who works at MIT's Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL).

The report further asserts that "the marker inside the body does not need to transmit any wireless signal. It simply reflects the signal transmitted by a device outside the body, without needing a battery or any other external source of energy. The ability to continuously sense inside the human body has largely been a distant dream."

"One of the roadblocks has been wireless communication to a device and its continuous localisation. 'ReMix' makes a leap in this direction by showing that the wireless component of implantable devices may no longer be the bottleneck," said Romit Roy Choudhury, Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at the University of Illinois, who was not involved in the research.

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