"To our knowledge, this is the first time the mobile phone microscope had been used in the field to diagnose intestinal parasitic infections, " said Isaac Bogoch, an internal medicine specialist at Toronto General Hospital.

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The extreme microscope will enable a number of subjective and time-consuming tasks such as counting the number of cells staining positive for a biomarker or locating cells infected with a parasite like malaria, to be replaced by highly repeatable and robust computer vision applications.

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But the microscope can also stage through and track cells over time.

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An electron microscope would be unreliable, particularly for someone infected a long time, because the number of cells harboring virus genes would be diluted over time and difficult to detect, said McGowan, the New York and New Jersey chairman of the American Academy of HIV Medicine.

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Despite being under the media microscope for the last four years, the hospital has also had time - and money - to correct the problems on its wards that first brought it to the public's attention.

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Adrian Cheng invented a powerful non-invasive, high-speed microscope technology for imaging the activity of thousands of cells in the brain simultaneously, in real time, offering a view of neural circuits at work.

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