Polarization and Orbital Angular Momentum of Light in Biomedical Applications: feature issue introduction

Abstract

In the last decade, consistent and successful innovations have been achieved in the field of lasers and optics, collectively known as ‘photonics’, founding new applications in biomedicine, including clinical biopsy. Non-invasive photonics-based diagnostic modalities are rapidly expanding, and with their exponential improvement, there is a great potential to develop practical instrumentation for automatic detection and identification of different types and/or sub-types of diseases at a very early stage. While using conventional light for the studies of different properties of objects in materials science, astrophysics and biomedicine already has a long history, the interaction of polarized light and optical angular momentum with turbid tissue-like scattering media has not yet been ultimately explored. Since recently this research area became a hot topic. This feature issue is a first attempt to summarize the recognitions achieved in this emerging research field of polarized light and optical angular momentum for practical biomedical applications during the last years.

Exploring the evolution of circular polarized light backscattered from turbid tissue-like disperse medium utilizing generalized Monte Carlo modeling approach with a combined use of Jones and Stokes–Mueller formalisms

“… 10 – 14 In biophotonics, MC methods, such as MCML, 15 created by L. Wang and S. Jacques, were originally designed to simulate scalar light transport within turbid scattering medium 16 , 17 and were fundamentally relying on the radiative transfer equation (RTE). 18 – 20 As significant role of polarized light in extending diagnostic capabilities of biomedical tools became apparent, 21 , 22 MC methods evolved accordingly resulting in many practical and popular tools particularly developed by Ramella-Roman, Prahl, and Jacques, 23 , 24 Hielscher, 25 , 26 Wang, 27 and Xu. 28 Fundamental ground for these polarized MC approaches was established by the vector radiative transfer equation (VRTE), which represents a system of equations for each Stokes parameter and can be rigorously derived from the Maxwell electromagnetic theory.…”

Analyzing the influence from oblique incidence on quantitively backscattering Mueller matrix polarimetry: a pilot ex-vivo tissue study

“…Polarimetry is gaining popularity due to its unique capacity to collect microstructural and optical information from tissue samples label-freely [1][2][3][4]. The Mueller matrix (MM) imaging method, as one of the available polarimetric techniques, can thoroughly characterize the polarization-related properties of media, such as diattenuation, retardance, and depolarization, which are crucial in biomedical studies and clinical trials [5][6][7].…”

Complex Fourier demodulation approach for the dual rotation polarizer-analyzer polarimeter

“…In the biomedical field, it has been proposed as a marker to identify cancerous tissue in its early stages [5]. In the ophthalmic field, researchers combine polarization with OCT techniques for retinal imaging implementations [6,7].…”

“…Retardance represents the phase variation dependence where its circularity is useful for glucose measurements, and its linearity is associated with stress analysis. Depolarization is the ability to maintain the polarization properties of the light, and its commonly used for cancer detection [5][6][7].…”