Abstract
.Mueller microscopy studies of fixed unstained histological cuts of human skin models were combined with an analysis of experimental data within the framework of differential Mueller matrix (MM) formalism. A custom-built Mueller polarimetric microscope was used in transmission configuration for the optical measurements of skin tissue model adjacent cuts of various nominal thicknesses (5 to ). The maps of both depolarization and polarization parameters were calculated from the corresponding microscopic MM images by applying a logarithmic Mueller matrix decomposition (LMMD) pixelwise. The parameters derived from LMMD of measured tissue cuts and the intensity of transmitted light were used for an automated segmentation of microscopy images to delineate dermal and epidermal layers. The quadratic dependence of depolarization parameters and linear dependence of polarization parameters on thickness, as predicted by the theory, was confirmed in our measurements. These findings pave the way toward digital histology with polarized light by presenting the combination of optimal optical markers, which allows mitigating the impact of tissue cut thickness fluctuations and increases the contrast of polarimetric images for tissue diagnostics.
Highlights
Studies of biological tissue with polarized light may bring important information on the tissue’s polarimetric properties, namely, depolarization power, retardance, and dichroism
The experimental studies of histological skin tissue model cuts with the polarimetric Mueller microscope have confirmed the validity of phenomenological differential formalism of fluctuating anisotropic media for biological tissues
As per theoretical logarithmic Mueller matrix decomposition (LMMD) prediction, we have demonstrated that total linear retardance and total linear dichroism of dermal layer depend linearly on thickness while the depolarization parameters demonstrate quadratic dependence with thickness
Summary
Studies of biological tissue with polarized light may bring important information on the tissue’s polarimetric properties, namely, depolarization power, retardance, and dichroism. The evolution of these properties with a disease (e.g., inflammation, degeneration, cancer, etc.) suggests using them as optical markers for diagnostics in clinical settings.[1,2,3,4,5] using these parameters for diagnostics requires (i) understanding the fundamental processes of interaction of polarized light with tissue and (ii) finding the optimal set of optical parameters, which will increase the accuracy of diagnostics. One needs to use Stokes–Mueller formalism to describe the interaction of polarized light with tissue Within its framework, both incident and reflected (or transmitted) polarized light beams are described by real 4 × 1 Stokes vectors. These instruments may operate in a spectroscopic or angular-resolved mode[7,8] and may provide both microscopic (few hundreds of μm2) and macroscopic (few cm2) polarimetric images of the sample.[2,3,4,5,9,10]
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