PillCam

The idea came from Gavriel Iddan, an electro-optical engineer at the defense company Rafael who had worked on missile cameras and began, in the early 1980s, to imagine a camera small enough to travel through the gut. With Gavriel Meron he founded Given Imaging in Yokneam in 1998, and in August 2001 the US FDA cleared its first capsule. About the size of a large vitamin pill (26 by 11 mm), the PillCam holds a camera, LED lights, batteries and a transmitter, and photographs the digestive tract twice a second as it passes, sending tens of thousands of images to a recorder worn on the patient's belt.

For the first time doctors could see the whole small intestine, some six meters long and largely beyond the reach of conventional endoscopes, without sedation, to find hidden bleeding, Crohn's disease, tumors and celiac damage. Capsule endoscopy became a standard tool used by millions of patients; Covidien bought Given Imaging in 2014 for about $860 million, and the PillCam is now part of Medtronic.