One of the difficulties of diagnosing tuberculosis is that there is no simple blood or urine test. Instead, a laboratory technician must take a sample of sputum coughed up from the lungs, stain it and inspect it under a microscope for the telltale bacteria, which resemble long-grain rice. It takes expertise that is often rare in poor countries. Guardian Technologies, a Virginia company that was started to help airport X-ray scanners distinguish explosives in luggage from innocuous plastics and liquids, has developed a system that automatically scans microscope slides for the bacillus. Click "source" to read the entire article.
