Abstract
Today the increasing cancer incidence rate is becoming one of the biggest threats to human health.Among all types of cancers, liver cancer ranks in the top five in both frequency and mortality rate all over the world. During the development of liver cancer, fibrosis often evolves as part of a healing process in response to liver damage, resulting in cirrhosis of liver tissues. In a previous study, we applied the Mueller matrix microscope to pathological liver tissue samples and found that both the Mueller matrix polar decomposition (MMPD) and Mueller matrix transformation (MMT) parameters are closely related to the fibrous microstructures. In this paper,we take this one step further to quantitatively facilitate the fibrosis detections and scorings of pathological liver tissue samples in different stages from cirrhosis to cancer using the Mueller matrix microscope. The experimental results of MMPD and MMT parameters for the fibrotic liver tissue samples in different stages are measured and analyzed. We also conduct Monte Carlo simulations based on the sphere birefringence model to examine in detail the influence of structural changes in different fibrosis stages on the imaging parameters. Both the experimental and simulated results indicate that the polarized light microscope and transformed Mueller matrix parameter scan provide additional quantitative information helpful for fibrosis detections and scorings of liver cirrhosis and cancers. Therefore, the polarized light microscope and transformed Mueller matrix parameters have a good application prospect in liver cancer diagnosis.
Highlights
As one of the most salient features of light, polarization can be used to develop imaging techniques capable of probing the structural and optical properties of media.[1,2,3] Polarization imaging methods have the ability to measure the microstructural information nondestructively in tissues, cells, and other specimens.[4,5] Polarization techniques can especially help suppress the multiscattered photons from deep tissues, and improve the imaging contrast of superficial layers of samples.[6]
We conduct the Monte Carlo (MC) simulations based on the sphere birefringence model to examine in detail the influence of structural changes in different fibrosis stages on the imaging parameters. Both the experimental and MC simulated results indicate that the polarized light microscope and transformed Mueller matrix parameters have a good application prospect in liver cancer diagnosis and scoring
Since the pathological liver tissues in different stages have different proportions of fibrous microstructures, the results shown in Figs. 8 and 9 confirm that the Mueller matrix polar decomposition (MMPD) and matrix transformation (MMT) parameters can provide additional quantitative information helpful for the accurate fibrosis scorings of liver cirrhosis and cancers
Summary
As one of the most salient features of light, polarization can be used to develop imaging techniques capable of probing the structural and optical properties of media.[1,2,3] Polarization imaging methods have the ability to measure the microstructural information nondestructively in tissues, cells, and other specimens.[4,5] Polarization techniques can especially help suppress the multiscattered photons from deep tissues, and improve the imaging contrast of superficial layers of samples.[6] For this reason, in the past two decades, several techniques such as the degree of polarization and difference polarization have been applied to the detection of human skin cancers in vivo.[7,8] Recently, as comprehensive descriptions of polarization properties, the Mueller matrix imaging techniques have been regarded as potential methods of cancerous tissues’ diagnosis[9] and preliminarily applied to the detection of colon cancer,[10,11,12] thyroid cancer,[13] cervical cancer,[14,15] and so on.[16,17,18] Through calculations using the Mueller matrix polar decomposition (MMPD) and Mueller matrix
Sign-in/Register to view highlights & summary 
Published Version (
Free)
Talk to us
Join us for a 30 min session where you can share your feedback and ask us any queries you have
Schedule a call