The invention, with a commercial value of $1 million, was built on site at the university over the past year using similar technologies to retail barcode scanners and office laser printers.

However, lead researcher Dr Steve Lee, a biomedical optics engineer, said compared with other microscopes it offered more flexibility and almost real-time imaging as it captured 800 frames per second.

"Scientists can use our new microscope to analyse complex medical problems ranging from blood disorders and cancer to neurological disorders," said Dr Lee, an ARC Discovery Early Career Researcher Award Fellow at the ANU Research School of Engineering.

"The microscope can speed up or slow down to capture the slow moving cells in a blood stream or live neurons firing rapidly in the brain."

Dr Lee said the microscope was designed to study live subjects and the high-frequency image capture meant the software could eliminate the impact of movement and breathing which in other imaging caused distortion and a lack of clarity.

The tool produced the same imaging resolution of conventional scanning microscopes on the market but at double the speed and gave analyst and researcher the ability to track movement within the body too.

"If a working biologist here was looking at clotting, this allows them to track real time what the velocity is in the vessel of the mice model," he said.

"In a study of a cancer tumour growth, what happens is the vessels increase and the blood flow changes. We are able to plot the overall flow rate, which tells you how much energy the tumour is consuming."

So how does this wonder-technology differ from your average supermarket checkout scanner you ask?

In barcode scanners, a laser beam bounces off a spinning polygon mirror, allowing it to scan across a sample very quickly. A barcode scanner registers a sequence of patterns to identify a product. A polygon mirror usually has around 10 mirror facets.

Dr Lee said the team's microscope used a more powerful laser beam as the light source and up to 36 mirror facets to scan the laser beam across the biological sample in a few thousandths of a second.

The research was published in the Journal of Biophotonics in January.

Lead author Yongxiao Li, a PhD student from the ANU Research School of Engineering, said modernising the polygon mirror microscopy system with advanced electronics and customised open-source software controls made the microscope a flexible imaging tool.

The project began in Australia but Dr Lee worked collaboratively with immunologists, neuroscientists and a microscopists within The John Curtin School of Medical Research, a biomedical scientist at the University of New South Wales and a biomedical engineer from Harvard University he met while studying in the United States.

Dr Lee said his team were open to commercialising the invention but in the event that didn't happen he would provide access to open-source plans so the international research community could replicate it.