In the late '90s I was asked to do image segmentation of multispectral data of brightfield microscope data. That is, given a picture of a bunch of cells, find all of the cells. There were two problems: image segmentation of sick cells is really hard (they're very blobby & fragmented), and the computer I had available took more than 20 minutes per image.

It was literally both cheaper and faster to have a grad student count the cells.

Let's be clear though: the researchers weren't interested in the cells; they were interested in having a pretty-darn-good count of cancerous cells vs. non-cancerous cells. Turns out, cancerous cells were a different color (brighter blue * brighter green) than healthy cells. So, instead, I just converted every image into RGB 3D space, counted all the pixels near 'dark green * dark blue', all the pixels near 'bright green * bright blue' then divided by the average area (in pixels) of each type of cell. The resulting counts were within 1% of the value the grad students could get, and the ratio was even more accurate.

We could get the cell count in a single linear, forward pass, as fast as the camera could take pictures.