Quantitative phase and polarization imaging through an optical fiber applied to detection of early esophageal tumorigenesis

Abstract

Phase and polarization of coherent light are highly perturbed by interaction with microstructural changes in premalignant tissue, holding promise for label-free detection of early tumors in endoscopically accessible tissues such as the gastrointestinal tract. Flexible optical multicore fiber (MCF) bundles used in conventional diagnostic endoscopy and endomicroscopy scramble phase and polarization, restricting clinicians instead to low-contrast amplitude-only imaging. We apply a transmission matrix characterization approach to produce full-field en-face images of amplitude, quantitative phase, and resolved polarimetric properties through an MCF. We first demonstrate imaging and quantification of biologically relevant amounts of optical scattering and birefringence in tissue-mimicking phantoms. We present an entropy metric that enables imaging of phase heterogeneity, indicative of disordered tissue microstructure associated with early tumors. Finally, we demonstrate that the spatial distribution of phase and polarization information enables label-free visualization of early tumors in esophageal mouse tissues, which are not identifiable using conventional amplitude-only information.

Quantitative Phase Imaging: Recent Advances and Expanding Potential in Biomedicine

“…Demonstrations of these techniques have so far been limited to ex vivo imaging. The eDPM system has been used to measure stained white blood cells and a similar holographic endoscope method was applied to mouse esophageal tumor samples, whereas the fiber optics qOBM imaging system has examined gliosarcoma cells from excised and formalin-fixed rat brain tissue (Figure c). Overall, work so far in this area points toward a bright future of applying various in vitro quantitative phase approaches to studies of mass regulation, biophysics, and the building of diagnostics based on QPI measurements of cells in vivo .…”

Principle and Implementation of Stokes Vector Polarization Imaging Technology

“…2022, 12, x FOR PEER REVIEW 2 of 13 polarization imaging is a new kind of photoelectric detection system, the method of using polarization imaging measurement objective reflection of the degree of polarization and polarization angle information, can effectively make up for the inadequacy of traditional imaging, solve traditional photometry is difficult to solve the problem in target recognition, and obtain the result of the high precision, and on the basis of traditional strength imaging increased the polarization information dimension, The polarization information of each point in the image can be obtained as well as the distribution of light intensity in two-dimensional space. At present, polarization imaging technology has shown potential application prospects in biomedicine [1,2], modern military [3,4], industrial detection [5][6][7], descattering imaging [8][9][10][11], navigation [12] and other fields. Polarization imaging methods mainly include Stokes vector imaging and Muller matrix imaging, and Stokes vector can be expressed as 4 × 1 column matrix or 1 × 4 row matrix, which is more convenient in describing fully polarized light, natural light and partially polarized light.…”

Application of EMCCD in the small-optical fiber endoscope imaging detection system

“…Optical fiber endoscope can flexibly insert the body cavity of human or animals, and perform optical endoscopic of hidden parts in the body that are not easily observed by the naked eye. By collecting tissue or cell specimens to provide image information of lesions for diagnosis of diseases [1,2], it has been widely used in clinical diagnosis of humen intestine, stomach and other cavity organs, as well as surgery for polyps and tumors. Endoscopic and appropriate biopsy are the criteria for early detection of cancer and judgment of lesions [3,4].…”