My name's David Cranston, I'm a consultant urological surgeon. The mainstay of treatment up until now has been surgery for kidney cancer. Well the main one that I'm interested in from the research point of view is new treatment in this unit where we are sitting now, called High Intensity Focused Ultrasound, and HIFU is a very good treatment for various types of cancer that's been developed over the last ten years or so, although the principles have been known about for many years.

Ultrasound scanning for diagnostic purposes is very well established in the field of medicine, but if you put the power up a great deal, ten thousand times what it is on diagnostic purposes, then you can create a machine like this one that we've got here, which uses high intensity to actually treat and target cancers within the body, without actually making a hole in the body.

A very good analogy of how it works is, if you as we all did when we were small, if you take a magnifying glass and you can focus the sun's rays on a piece of paper; it's very accurate, if you can see what you are wanting to treat on the diagnostic ultrasound, then you can target it very accurately with the treatment ultrasound.

It's got I think in the future huge potential across a wide range of different type of cancers. The other advantage that this has over radiotherapy is that it is repeatable, you can give it more than once, whereas radiotherapy, you can't repeat radiotherapy to the same area, so I think it's a great example of cutting edge technology, it's been transmitted from the bench to the bedside, but also not just covering one specialty but covering a whole range of different specialties.