Abstract
Mueller matrices can be used as a powerful tool to probe qualitatively the microstructures of biological tissues. Certain transformation processes can provide new sets of parameters which are functions of the Mueller matrix elements but represent more explicitly the characteristic features of the sample. In this paper, we take the backscattering Mueller matrices of a group of tissues with distinctive structural properties. Using both experiments and Monte Carlo simulations, we demonstrate qualitatively the characteristic features of Mueller matrices corresponding to different structural and optical properties. We also calculate two sets of transformed polarization parameters using the Mueller matrix transformation (MMT) and Mueller matrix polar decomposition (MMPD) techniques. We demonstrate that the new parameters can separate the effects due to sample orientation and present quantitatively certain characteristic features of these tissues. Finally, we apply the transformed polarization parameters to the unstained human cervix cancerous tissues. Preliminary results show that the transformed polarization parameters can provide characteristic information to distinguish the cancerous and healthy tissues.
Highlights
Polarization imaging techniques provide rich microstructural and optical information of samples, and have been tested in material, textiles and biomedical applications [1,2,3,4,5]
3.1 Characteristic features in backscattering Mueller matrix elements Figure 4 shows the experimental results of the backscattering Mueller matrices of different tissue samples
All the matrix elements are normalized by the m11. It can be observed from the Mueller matrices of chicken heart sample shown in Fig. 4(a) and bovine skeletal muscle sample shown in Fig. 4(b) that there are some prominent characteristic features of anisotropic media
Summary
Polarization imaging techniques provide rich microstructural and optical information of samples, and have been tested in material, textiles and biomedical applications [1,2,3,4,5]. A Mueller matrix provides a comprehensive characterization of the polarization properties of the sample [9]. It describes only how the polarization state of light changes before and after the interaction with the media, but gives little information on the physics of the photon-tissue interactions and the microstructure of the scattering media. One can derive new sets of polarization parameters which are functions of the Mueller matrix elements, but separate the effects due to sample orientation and present an explicit relationship to the structural and optical properties of the sample
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