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Pigeons can be trained to recognise images of cancerous cells according to Scientist Richard Leveson. He explained to 5 live's Chris Smith why he decided to put pigeons through their paces, and whether we might be seeing pigeon pathology labs in the future.

"A colleague had just published a paper on the ability of pigeons to demonstrate remarkable visual memory, so for no particularly good reason, I wondered how pigeons would do in my field of pathology imaging", Leveson said.

"Pathologists are the product of years and years of training, so it would be surprising if pigeons could do this, and that's the surprising result - the pigeons were very good at it."

So, will we see pigeon pathology labs? "I don't think this will happen any time soon, and it's not very practical", he said.

This clip is originally from 5 live Science on Saturday 21 November 2015.