Polarimetric imaging of uterine cervix: a case study

Abstract

We present a preliminary investigation of macroscopic polarimetric imaging of uterine cervix. Orthogonal state contrast (OSC) images of healthy and anomalous cervices have been taken in vivo at 550 nm. Four ex vivo cervix samples have been studied in full Muller polarimetry, at 550 nm and 700 nm, and characterized in detail by standard pathology. One sample was totally healthy, another one carried CIN lesions at very early stage (CIN1) in its visible exocervical region, while for the other two samples more advanced (CIN3) lesions were present, together with visible glandular epithelium (ectropion). Significant birefringence has been observed in the healthy regions of all six samples, both in vivo and ex vivo. Standard treatments of the Mueller images of the ex vivo samples allowed to quantify both retardation and depolarization. Retardation reached 60° in healthy regions, and disappeared in the anomalous regions of the other three ex vivo samples. The depolarization power was largest in healthy regions, and lower in CINs and ectropion. Possible origins of the observed effects are briefly discussed.

Mueller polarimetric imaging for surgical and diagnostic applications: a review

“…Mueller matrix descriptions have been extended towards tissue autofluorescence spectroscopy and initially explored for cervical cancerous tissue diagnosis, as shown in Figure 2(e). The additional linear and cir- [12,21,22,164,167] cular diattenuation spectra possess potential advantages over elastic scattering based approaches. Contrast can be observed between normal and precancerous groups attributed to the loss of anisotropic organization of collagen, which suggests that fluorescence diattenuation and polarizance originating from anisotropic organization of collagen in the connective tissue may serve as potentially useful diagnostic metrics [167].…”

“…The characteristic polarization information of interest is carried by a 4 3 4 matrix named a Mueller matrix and this can be experimentally obtained from Mueller polarimetry and polarimetric imaging. In recent years, an increasing number of biomedical applications of Mueller polarimetric imaging techniques have been proposed [5], e. g. oral cancerous legion detection [13], cervical cancer and colon cancer detection and staging [12,[14][15][16][17][18][19], assessment of cancer therapy [20], partial bladder obstruction diagnosis [21], guiding mass spectrometry for instant pathology [22], characterizing collagen fibres [23], and these have demonstrated advantages over polarization blind imaging.…”

Characterizing microstructures of cancerous tissues using multispectral transformed Mueller matrix polarization parameters

“…Experimental and MC simulated results have shown that the healthy cervix tissues are highly anisotropic [10,25]. However, anisotropy, as represented by retardance δ or the MMT parameter A, reduces significantly in the cancerous regions.…”

“…Some of the linear polarization imaging methods have even been combined with endoscopes for in vivo diagnostic purposes [8,9]. Since a Mueller matrix provides a comprehensive characterization of the polarization properties and contains abundant microstructural and optical information of the sample, imaging methods based on Mueller matrix polarimetry are becoming increasingly attractive for differentiating the pathological structural features of biological samples, such as different types of cancers at different stages [10][11][12][13][14][15].…”

Quantitatively characterizing the microstructural features of breast ductal carcinoma tissues in different progression stages by Mueller matrix microscope

“…The previous literature shows that more than 85% of cancers originate from the superficial epithelium, which means that polarization imaging methods have great potential in screening and identifying cancer at an early stage [19,20]. Therefore, Mueller matrix polarimetry has been used to assist the diagnosis of various cancerous tissues, such as skin cancer [21], cervical cancer [22], colon cancer [23], liver cancer [24,25], and so on [26,27]. Recently, we have designed a Mueller matrix microscope by adding a polarization state generator and analyzer (PSG and PSA) to a commercial transmission-light microscope and applied it to detect human liver and cervical cancerous tissues with fibrosis [24,25].…”