Abstract
Prior work demonstrated significant contrast in visible wavelength Mueller matrix images for healthy and pre-cancerous regions of excised cervical tissue. This work demonstrates post-processing compressions of the full Mueller matrix that preserve detection performance. The purpose of this post-processing is to understand polarimetric measurement utility for computing mathematical observers and designing future imaging protocols. The detection performance of the full Mueller matrix, and both linear and non-linear parameters of the Mueller matrix will be compared. The area under the receiver operating characteristic (ROC) curve, otherwise known as the AUC, is the gold standard metric to quantify detection performance in medical applications. An AUC = 1 is perfect detection and AUC = 0.5 is the performance of guessing. Either the scalar retardance or the 3 smallest eigenvalues of the coherency matrix yield an average AUC of 0.94 or 0.93, respectively. When these four non-linear parameters are used simultaneously the average AUC is 0.95. The J-optimal Channelized Quadratic Observer (J-CQO) method for optimizing polarimetric measurements demonstrates equivalent AUC values for the full Muller matrix and 6 J-CQO optimized measurements. The advantage of this optimization is that only 6 measurements, instead of 16 for the full Mueller matrix, are required to achieve this AUC.
Highlights
The most widely used method for reliable cancer diagnosis is excisional tissue biopsy
Thereafter, the light backscattered by the sample passes through a Polarization State Analyzer (PSA) made of the same elements in a reverse order compared to Polarization State Generator (PSG) assembly
The LC decomposition is a popular method which yields scalar retardance and depolarization index; both are non-linear parameters of the Mueller matrix [20]
Summary
The most widely used method for reliable cancer diagnosis is excisional tissue biopsy This process is invasive, time-consuming, and expensive and has motivated the development of optical biopsy techniques [1]. Among other optical imaging techniques Mueller polarimetry has demonstrated sensitivity to the structural and morphological microscopic transformations of biological tissue [3, 4] These transformations are potentially related to the presence of pathology, and contrast between healthy versus cancerous excised tissue has been shown in prior Mueller imaging studies [5,6,7]. This polarimetric technique provides a macroscopic field of view (≈10 cm2), and the delineation of suspicious areas can be imaged without any tissue contact. Through the integration of this technology into conventional instruments (e.g., colposcope, endoscope), polarimetric imaging is a promising tool for in vivo cancer detection and staging [8,9,10]
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