Computational image translation from Mueller matrix polarimetry to bright-field microscopy.

Abstract

Mueller matrix (MM) polarimetry can provide comprehensive information about the polarization properties that are closely related to the microstructural features and has demonstrated its potential in biomedical studies and clinical practices, and bright-field microscopy is widely used in pathological diagnosis as the golden standard. In this work, we improve the throughput of MM microscopy by learning a statistical transformation between these two imaging systems based on deep learning. Using this approach, the MM microscope can generate an image that is equivalent to a bright-field microscope image of the matching field of view. We add new transformative capability to the existing MM imaging system without requiring extra hardware. The translation model is based on conditional generative adversarial network with customized loss functions. We demonstrated the effectiveness of our approach on liver and breast tissues and evaluated the performance by four quantitative similarity assessment methods in pixel, image and distribution levels, respectively.