Abstract: Secondary electron imaging (SEI) modalities, such as scanning electron microscopy and helium ion microscopy (HIM), are widely used for nanoscale visualization. They are known to suffer from super-Poissonian noise and are generally qualitative because of unknown detector parameters. Over a number of years, my group has been working to develop SEI as a quantitative modality with robustness to various sources of noise. Early works established improvements in accuracy and mitigation of beam current variation under an idealized model for secondary electron detection. The central idea is to recognize that there are phenomena within each pixel dwell time that make it worthwhile to measure more than a single scalar value during that dwell time. Recently, we have shown how to use our central idea with an existing HIM instrument, without replacing its noisy Everhart-Thornley detector. With ion count-aided microscopy, we demonstrate an improvement in the dose-accuracy tradeoff that enables dose reduction by a factor between 2 and 3. Consistent with theory, this is an improvement factor approximately equal to the secondary electron yield; this can be larger than 2 to 3, especially when heavier incident ions are used. Our improvement represents a near elimination of source shot noise and reduction of super-Poissonian noise to merely Poissonian. This work enables nanoscale material characterization at low doses suitable for beam-sensitive biological samples.