Generalized Jones matrix optical coherence tomography: performance and local birefringence imaging

Abstract

Phase retardation imaging including local birefringence imaging of biological tissues is described by generalized Jones-matrix optical coherence tomography. The polarization properties of a local tissue can be obtained from two Jones matrices that are measured by backscattered lights from the front and back boundaries of the local tissue. The error in the phase retardation measurement due to background noise is analyzed theoretically, numerically, and experimentally. The minimum detectable phase retardation is estimated from numerical simulations. The theoretical analysis suggests that the measurements with two orthogonal input polarization states have the lowest retardation error. Local birefringence imaging is applied to the human anterior eye chamber and skin in vivo.

Estimation of Jones matrix, birefringence and entropy using Cloude-Pottier decomposition in polarization-sensitive optical coherence tomography

“…(1) along the depth. The cumulative attribute can be eliminated by calculating a local Jones matrix [10,38,39]. Instead of the cumulative Jones matrix in Eq.…”

“…Since everything about PS-OCT is more complicated than conventional OCT, it still has plenty of room left for improvement of PS-OCT in aspects of both the hardware and the software. Among them, Makita et al raised one of the fundamental issues in PS-OCT that the mean of the phase retardation is significantly biased from the true value because of asymmetric distribution [10]. Various methods have been developed to apply averaging to such polarimetric parameters [11][12][13][14][15][16][17][18][19].…”

Three-dimensional multi-contrast imaging of in vivo human skin by Jones matrix optical coherence tomography

“…The depth-resolved birefringence (local retardation) tomography was obtained by local Jones matrix analysis [24] combined with a maximum a posteriori birefringence estimator [25]. For easy observation, a pseudo-color birefringence tomography is created by combining the scattering intensity, birefringence, and reliability of the birefringence estimation.…”

“…Therefore, a depth-localized birefringence measurement is required for more accurate dermatological investigation. The limitation of cumulative phase retardation imaging can be overcome by the birefringence measurement based on localized Jones matrix measurement [23][24][25]. Although the local Jones matrix measurement suffers from a low signalto-noise ratio and inaccurate phase-retardation and birefringence, these problems were recently resolved by birefringence and phase retardation estimation techniques that include the coherent averaging of the Jones matrix and/or Jones vector [26][27][28], eigen-value-based averaging [29], Jones matrix estimation based on the Cloude-Pottier decomposition [30], Muller analysis [31,32], a specially designed phase-retardation estimation function [33], and maximum a posteriori birefringence estimators [25,34,35].…”

Depth-encoded all-fiber swept source polarization sensitive OCT

“…This can be achieved by sorting the two eigenvalues by their magnitudes prior to taking their ratio. Since the magnitudes of the two eigenvalues determine the relative attenuation of polarizations by the sample [57], sorting by eigenvalue magnitude is equivalent to assuming that adjacent pixels have consistent relative attenuation in biological samples. Therefore, this averaging method relaxes the requirement for phase stability by utilizing the spatial uniformity of the sample.…”