Velocity Web Site - Up your nose with an optic fibre


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	Up your nose with an optic fibre
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This kind of science gets right up your nose: Michal Szczesniak tests the device

Bits & pieces

Swallowing involves synchronising voluntary muscles (such as the tongue) with those you don't consciously control. These involuntary muscles do things such as shut off the entrance to the lungs and contract in sequence to push food along the oesophagus to the stomach

Apart from life being a misery because you can't eat properly, dysphagia can lead to lung infections (when food goes down the wrong way), malnourishment and, in extreme cases, death.

Up your nose with an optic fibre

If you've ever been drinking when someone's made you laugh, and it's all come out your nose, then you know just how easy it is to throw the everyday activity of swallowing into complete chaos.

Rather you than me, mate: Dr John Arkwright watches the data come in

Problems with swallowing, which medicos call dysphagia, are quite common. About one in twenty people will have it at some stage. Some children are born with physical defects that mean they can't swallow properly, some just don't get the knack and, at the other end of the age spectrum, there are folks who've had a stroke or degenerative disease.

Sorting out what's going wrong where is difficult; getting food from your mouth to your stomach is more complicated than you'd think. One way to test a patient's swallow involves passing a tube-like device through the nose and into the throat (it takes this route so patients don't chomp on the instrument during the test).

Some of these devices can be large, expensive, take a while to set up and need experts to run them. Worst of all for young children, the patient may have to stay still for a long time. Clinician Dr Taher Omari and speech therapist Dr Nathalie Rommel, from the Adelaide Women's and Children's Hospital, figured there had to be a better way and asked CSIRO for help.

"Our brief was to develop a smaller catheter-based sensor that works just as well as current devices, but which could be quickly set up and operated by hospital staff with no experience of the technology," said Dr John Arkwright of CSIRO Industrial Physics. "It also had to be cheap enough to throw away as sterilising these instruments can be tricky and expensive."

John, who's into optic fibres, teamed up with Mr Simon Doe from the Manufacturing and Infrastructure Technology part of CSIRO, who's an expert in joining very small things together. Combining their expertise, they made a catheter barely three millimetres in diameter which use some nifty physics and modern telecommunications technology to measure the waves of pressure when someone swallows.

It all comes down to the weird things physicists like John can do with light. "The advantage is that lots of sensors can be strung along the length of the catheter without increasing its outer diameter," he said. "This has never been possible before, and smaller catheters make the whole process of diagnosis much more viable for young children."

Mr Michal Szczesniak, a researcher at St George Hospital in Sydney, gave himself the dubious distinction of being the first to try out the device by shoving it up his own nose. Unfortunately for him, they were doing a side-by-side comparison of the old and the new so the slim fibre was taped to a standard sensor more than four millimetres in diameter.

With the support of both hospitals, John and Simon are preparing their device for clinical trial and are confident that the uncomfortable, un-nerving procedures for diagnosing dysphagia will soon be in the past.