BRINGING the revolutionary "magic eye" equipment to East Lancashire is a personal quest for consultant surgeon David Chang.

The Blackburn-raised consultant, now based at the town's Royal Infirmary, aims to bring the state-of-the-art cancer scanning equipment to his home area of East Lancashire, with the help of the Lancashire Evening Telegraph's £200,000 Magic Eye appeal.

There are only a handful of these machines -- which can see through the walls of arteries and organs -- in the whole of the country.

The 'magic eye' equipment will help to detect cancers of the stomach and oesophagus, which are responsible for one in seven cancer deaths.

Up to 600 people a year develop these types of cancers across East Lancashire and the scanner, an endoscopic ultrasound, will make diagnosis for them quicker, less traumatic and almost 100 per cent accurate, thus helping to save lives.

The number of cases of cancer in these areas of the body is growing faster than any other type of cancer.

"Having been brought up in Blackburn, it is especially nice to think that it will come here for the people of Blackburn," Mr Chang said.

"We have nothing like this in the whole of Lancashire at the moment. None of the patients in this area have access to this equipment, which we feel is detrimental to the local population. This equipment will make a difference in terms of quality of care to those people who have these kinds of cancers.

"Without this type of equipment at the moment it is a bit of a blunderbus approach. The endoscopic scanner will help to tailor the treatment to the individual, which can only be good because everybody is different."

Mr Chang, who has been working at BRI for five years, likened the way the new ultrasound endosocope worked to being in a tunnel.

"The endoscope allows us to see inside the walls of the tunnel -- like the standard endoscopes do at the moment.

"But with the new endoscope we can also see outside the tunnel through the walls, with a system akin to radar.

"It is something we have never had access to before and it is always exciting to be on the frontiers of modern technology."

He said it would help up to 300 patients a year, who would receive an accurate diagnosis and would therefore be selected for the best treatment for their cancer, which could include major surgery.

He added that the technology would bring closer links between Blackburn and Burnley, and benefit patients across East Lancashire, some of whom suffered from other conditions in the same area of the body, although not necessarily cancers.