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Smart microscopes of the future

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We dream of a future where light microscopes have new capabilities: language-guided image acquisition, automatic image analysis based on extensive prior training from biologist experts, and language-guided image analysis for custom analyses. Most capabilities have reached the proof-of-principle stage, but implementation would be accelerated by efforts to gather appropriate training sets and make user-friendly interfaces.

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Fig. 1: A vision for a microscope of the future.

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Acknowledgements

This work was supported by the National Institutes of Health (NIH P41 GM135019 to A.E.C., B.A.C. and K.W.E.).

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Correspondence to Anne E. Carpenter.

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Nature Methods thanks Henry Pinkard for his contribution to the peer review of this work.

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Carpenter, A.E., Cimini, B.A. & Eliceiri, K.W. Smart microscopes of the future. Nat Methods 20, 962–964 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41592-023-01912-0

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