Abstract
Mueller matrix polarimetry is a potentially powerful technique for obtaining microstructural information of biomedical specimens. Thus, it has found increasing application in both backscattering imaging of bulk tissue samples and transmission microscopic imaging of thin tissue slices. Recently, we proposed a technique to transform the 4 × 4 Mueller matrix elements into a group of parameters, which have explicit associations with specific microstructural features of samples. In this paper, we thoroughly analyze the relationships between the Mueller matrix transformation parameters and the characteristic microstructures of tissues by using experimental phantoms and Monte Carlo simulations based on different tissue mimicking models. We also adopt quantitative evaluation indicators to compare the Mueller matrix transformation parameters with the Mueller matrix polar decomposition parameters. The preliminary imaging results of bulk porcine colon tissues and thin human pathological tissue slices demonstrate the potential of Mueller matrix transformation parameters as biomedical diagnostic indicators. Also, this study provides quantitative criteria for parameter selection in biomedical Mueller matrix imaging.
Highlights
Polarization imaging techniques are sensitive to microstructural changes in tissues, and can be regarded as potential tools for biomedical diagnosis [1,2,3]
It can be observed from the experimental results that the upper left 3 × 3 elements of the silk phantom represent periodic intensity variations, while for the GRIN lens similar periodic variations are observed for the lower right 3 × 3 elements
We choose the element values from the range of radii as 0.42 cm to 0.54 cm for silk phantom curves and 0.8 mm to 0.9 mm for GRIN lens curves
Summary
Polarization imaging techniques are sensitive to microstructural changes in tissues, and can be regarded as potential tools for biomedical diagnosis [1,2,3]. A Mueller matrix contains rich structural information about tissues, such information is difficult to obtain from the 16 elements directly. To deal with this problem, several methods have been proposed to transform these 16 Mueller matrix elements into different groups of derived parameters with clearer physical and structural meaning [12,13,14,15]. In our previous studies, we have found that the Mueller matrix elements of anisotropic media can be fitted to trigonometric functions Based on these functions, the MMT parameters can be obtained and provide several indicators of anisotropy, depolarization, and direction of fibrous structures [3]. There are some other recent studies in the Mueller matrix analysis, where the Mueller matrix images of tissues were analyzed in the frame of groups of parameters [19,20,21,22]
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