Tawheed A, Ismail A, Amer MS, Elnahas O, Mowafy T. Capsule endoscopy: Do we still need it after 24 years of clinical use? World J Gastroenterol 2025; 31(5): 102692 [DOI: 10.3748/wjg.v31.i5.102692]
Corresponding Author of This Article
Ahmed Tawheed, MD, PhD, Department of Endemic Medicine, Faculty of Medicine, Helwan University, Ain Helwan, Cairo 11795, Egypt. ahmed.tawhid@med.helwan.edu.eg
Research Domain of This Article
Gastroenterology & Hepatology
Article-Type of This Article
Letter to the Editor
Open-Access Policy of This Article
This article is an open-access article which was selected by an in-house editor and fully peer-reviewed by external reviewers. It is distributed in accordance with the Creative Commons Attribution Non Commercial (CC BY-NC 4.0) license, which permits others to distribute, remix, adapt, build upon this work non-commercially, and license their derivative works on different terms, provided the original work is properly cited and the use is non-commercial. See: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/
World J Gastroenterol. Feb 7, 2025; 31(5): 102692 Published online Feb 7, 2025. doi: 10.3748/wjg.v31.i5.102692
Capsule endoscopy: Do we still need it after 24 years of clinical use?
Ahmed Tawheed, Alaa Ismail, Mohab S Amer, Osama Elnahas, Tawhid Mowafy
Ahmed Tawheed, Department of Endemic Medicine, Faculty of Medicine, Helwan University, Cairo 11795, Egypt
Alaa Ismail, Mohab S Amer, Osama Elnahas, Faculty of Medicine, Helwan University, Cairo 11795, Egypt
Mohab S Amer, Department of Research, SMART Company for Research Services, Cairo 11795, Egypt
Tawhid Mowafy, Department of Internal Medicine, Gardenia Medical Center, Doha 0000, Qatar
Author contributions: All authors have contributed to this article and have approved the final version of the manuscript; Tawheed A designed the overall concept and outline of the manuscript; Ismail A wrote the manuscript; Amer MS conducted the database search; Elnahas O designed the graphical abstract; Mowafy T and Tawheed A provided important technical details and revised the manuscript.
Conflict-of-interest statement: The authors declare that they have no conflicts of interest.
Open-Access: This article is an open-access article that was selected by an in-house editor and fully peer-reviewed by external reviewers. It is distributed in accordance with the Creative Commons Attribution NonCommercial (CC BY-NC 4.0) license, which permits others to distribute, remix, adapt, build upon this work non-commercially, and license their derivative works on different terms, provided the original work is properly cited and the use is non-commercial. See: https://creativecommons.org/Licenses/by-nc/4.0/
Corresponding author: Ahmed Tawheed, MD, PhD, Department of Endemic Medicine, Faculty of Medicine, Helwan University, Ain Helwan, Cairo 11795, Egypt. ahmed.tawhid@med.helwan.edu.eg
Received: October 28, 2024 Revised: November 20, 2024 Accepted: December 2, 2024 Published online: February 7, 2025 Processing time: 65 Days and 21.1 Hours
Abstract
In this letter, we comment on a recent article published in the World Journal of Gastroenterology by Xiao et al, where the authors aimed to use a deep learning model to automatically detect gastrointestinal lesions during capsule endoscopy (CE). CE was first presented in 2000 and was approved by the Food and Drug Administration in 2001. The indications of CE overlap with those of regular diagnostic endoscopy. However, in clinical practice, CE is usually used to detect lesions in areas inaccessible to standard endoscopies or in cases of bleeding that might be missed during conventional endoscopy. Since the emergence of CE, many physiological and technical challenges have been faced and addressed. In this letter, we summarize the current challenges and briefly mention the proposed methods to overcome these challenges to answer a central question: Do we still need CE?
Core Tip: In this letter, we comment on a recent article published in the World Journal of Gastroenterology by Xiao et al, wherein the authors explored the use of a deep learning model to automatically detect gastrointestinal lesions during capsule endoscopy. We conclude that while capsule endoscopy remains a valuable tool in clinical practice, it carries many challenges that discourage its routine use. These challenges must be addressed in future studies to enhance its practicality and adoption by gastroenterologists.
