Microscopic single-pixel polarimetry for biological tissue

Abstract

Single-pixel imaging (SPI) is a computational imaging modality that reconstructs images from information collected with a single-pixel detector. Due to the relatively large bandwidth and cheap price of single-pixel detectors over pixel-array detectors, SPI has been demonstrated with great success in many imaging scenarios. In this work, we further extended SPI to microscopic Mueller-matrix polarimetry, which is capable of providing polarization-sensitive properties of biological tissue with a millimeter-size field of view and micrometer-size resolution. As a proof of concept, we applied polarimetry on normal and cancerous esophagus tissues from patients and reconstructed their Mueller matrices. Effects of depolarization, retardation, and diattenuation were also examined by decomposing Mueller matrices. We envision that the developed computational technique can bring new possibilities for both SPI and Mueller-matrix polarimetry.