Characterization of Liver Cancer Tissues Utilizing the Optical Polarized System

Abstract

According to GLOBOCAN, in 2012, liver cancer with 782,000 cases was diagnosed, and 746,000 patients died from this disease in the world. The rate of liver cancer was ranked 5th in the types of cancer in men and ranked 9th in women, but the death rate accounted for 2nd in both sexes. In Vietnam, the liver cancer rate was ranked 2nd in men and ranked 3rd in women on morbidity, while the highest death rate occurred in both sexes. Meanwhile, the prognosis for liver cancer is quite sad, which depends on many factors. Currently, there are many methods to monitor the treatment of liver cancer depends on the stage of the disease, in which the noninvasive process is considered a new study on cancer diagnosis without pain or injury to patients, and one of them is the use of optical measurement systems. Study on the interaction between bio-samples and polarized light received significant attention because of its potential for developing non-invasive detection methods. In this work, an analytical technique based on Stokes polarimetry and the Mueller matrix decomposition method was applied to extract the effective linear birefringence (LB), linear dichroism (LD), circular birefringence (CB), circular dichroism (CD), linear depolarization (L-Dep), and circular depolarization (C-Dep) properties. The experimental results showed that the LB properties of normal and liver cancer tissues have a great difference, with 15°–20° and 150°–160° in that order. In addition, CB properties and depolarization properties of two kinds of samples are also described in a significant disparity. Thus, it has promising potential for detecting liver cancer by an optical polarized light system.