The high fatality rate associated with the late detection of skin cancer makes early detection crucial in preventing death. The current method for determining if a skin lesion is suspect to cancer is initially based on the patient's and physician's subjective observation of the skin lesion. Physicians use a set of parameters called the ABCD (asymmetry, border, color, diameter) rule to help facilitate diagnosis of potential cancerous lesions. Lesions that are suspicious then require a biopsy, which is a painful, invasive, and a time-consuming procedure. In an attempt to reduce the aforementioned undesirable elements currently associated with skin cancer diagnosis, a novel optical polarization-imaging system is described that has the potential to noninvasively detect cancerous lesions. The described system generates the full 16-element Mueller matrix in less than 70 s. The operation of the system was tested in transmission, specular reflection, and diffuse reflectance modes, using known samples, such as a horizontal linear polarizer, a mirror, and a diffuser plate. In addition, it was also used to image a benign lesion on a human subject. The results of the known samples are in good agreement with their theoretical values with an average accuracy of 97.96% and a standard deviation of 0.0084, using 16 polarization images. The system accuracy was further increased to 99.44% with a standard deviation of 0.005, when 36 images were used to generate the Mueller matrix.

Over the last two decades polarimetry has been investigated as a noninvasive alternative for glucose monitoring in support of diabetic patients. In particular, the anterior chamber of the eye containing the fluid known as the aqueous humor has been confirmed to be the optimal sensing site for polarimetric glucose measurements due to its reasonable pathlength (1 cm), low scatter, and minimal depolarization index. In essence, the eye can be thought of as an optical window into the body. In this paper, we will first introduce the key challenges that must be overcome to make the use of polarized light in the eye a viable method for noninvasive glucose monitoring, summarize our work toward this endeavor, and then report on our latest research, namely, the effect of temperature, pH, and corneal birefringence on our polarimetric glucose monitoring system.

In the recent past, several noninvasive optically based methods have been proposed for physiologic glucose sensing. One proposed optical sensing site has been the eye, which, due to its unique optical properties, can be considered as a transparent optical window into the body. In particular, the aqueous humor within the anterior chamber of the eye has been shown to contain glucose levels correlated to those of blood. Concern, however, has been expressed that using the aqueous humor solution as a measure of blood glucose may be problematic due to the potential transport time delay between the blood and the aqueous humor glucose concentrations. This investigation was performed to measure the transport time delay in a rabbit model. The time delay between the blood and aqueous humor glucose concentrations was measured invasively in five New Zealand White rabbits over a series of weeks. An anesthesia protocol containing the drug Xylazine was used to elevate the blood glucose levels to a level commonly seen in diabetic patients. The difference between the glucose peak location times occurring in the blood and aqueous humor glucose response was measured and defined as the transport time delay. The average transport time lag was measured to be under 5 min. This measured time delay indicates that, indeed, the eye could potentially be used as a sensing site for indirect blood glucose measurements and may eventually aid the development of a noninvasive glucose sensor due to its unique optical properties compared to other biological tissues.

Trauma care including abdominal trauma is a big challenge. It is associated with high morbidity and mortality and continues to be a public health problem worldwide. The main aims of our study were to assess the patterns and outcomes of our patients, and to describe our experience in management of abdominal trauma. This descriptive retrospective study was conducted in general surgery department at National Centre Hospital of Nouakchott in Mauritania. We recruited patients presented at our department with abdominal trauma (2012-2016). Out of 100 cases, 92% were men. Mean age: 22.78 years (5-70 years). Eighty percent of patients suffered of penetrating abdominal trauma. Stab injuries were the most frequent mechanism (60%). The commonest organ injury was small intestine (16%). Mortality has been strongly related to road traffic accidents. Cares of severe abdominal traumas are not common in our hospital, due to lack of required overall data. Emergency health system is needed to better care of trauma patients in Mauritania.

The pseudodielectric function is often used to represent ellipsometric data and corresponds to the actual dielectric functions of materials when there is no surface overlayer and the material is isotropic. If a uniaxial material is oriented such that the optic axis is in the plane of incidence or is perpendicular to the plane of incidence, then the cross-polarization terms are zero and appropriate pseudodielectric functions can be determined from the ellipsometry data. We calculate the pseudodielectric functions for uniaxial crystals in three primary symmetry directions: (1) the optic axis is perpendicular to the plane of incidence, (2) the optic axis is in the plane of the sample surface and parallel to the plane of incidence, and (3) the optic axis is in the plane of the sample surface and perpendicular to the plane of incidence. These results are expanded in terms of the difference in the ordinary and extraordinary dielectric functions and compared with the approximation of Aspnes [J. Opt. Soc. Am. 70, 1275 (1980)]. Comparisons are made with experimental results on oriented crystals of rutile (TiO2), and a simple procedure is presented to determine the complex dielectric function from standard ellipsometry techniques.