Small bowel capsule endoscopy: have we conquered the last frontier?

Capsule endoscopy was launched at the beginning of this millennium and has since become a well-established tool for evaluating the entire small bowel for manifold pathologies. CE far exceeded our early expectations by providing us with a tool to establish the correct diagnosis for such elusive gastrointestinal conditions as obscure gastrointestinal bleeding, Crohn's disease, polyposis syndrome and others. Recent evidence has shown CE to be superior to other imaging modalities - such as small bowel follow-through X-ray, colonoscopy with ileoscopy, computerized tomographic enterography, magnetic resonance enteroclysis and push enteroscopy--for diagnosing small bowel pathologies. Since the emergence of CE, more than 650,000 capsules have been swallowed worldwide, and more than 700 peer-reviewed publications have appeared in the literature. This review summarizes the essential data that emerged from these studies.