Tissue polarimetry: concepts, challenges, applications, and outlook

Abstract

Polarimetry has a long and successful history in various forms of clear media. Driven by their biomedical potential, the use of the polarimetric approaches for biological tissue assessment has also recently received considerable attention. Specifically, polarization can be used as an effective tool to discriminate against multiply scattered light (acting as a gating mechanism) in order to enhance contrast and to improve tissue imaging resolution. Moreover, the intrinsic tissue polarimetry characteristics contain a wealth of morphological and functional information of potential biomedical importance. However, in a complex random medium-like tissue, numerous complexities due to multiple scattering and simultaneous occurrences of many scattering and polarization events present formidable challenges both in terms of accurate measurements and in terms of analysis of the tissue polarimetry signal. In order to realize the potential of the polarimetric approaches for tissue imaging and characterization/diagnosis, a number of researchers are thus pursuing innovative solutions to these challenges. In this review paper, we summarize these and other issues pertinent to the polarized light methodologies in tissues. Specifically, we discuss polarized light basics, Stokes-Muller formalism, methods of polarization measurements, polarized light modeling in turbid media, applications to tissue imaging, inverse analysis for polarimetric results quantification, applications to quantitative tissue assessment, etc.

Mueller polarimetric imaging for surgical and diagnostic applications: a review

“…The absorption may therefore actually cause interference with scattering analysis based on depolarization spectra, which deserves more attention and effort to correct. An individual molecule with anisotropic structures, like amino acids, may manifest polarization dependent absorption (diattenuation) [101], but absorption by bulk tissue does not exhibit polarization dependence in most cases as a result of the random spatial distribution of the molecules in tissue.…”

“…The observable tissue retardance mainly originates from anisotropic fibrous tissue structures like collagen fibrils and elastin fibres, which are equivalent to uniaxial birefringent crystals [101][102][103]. Cancerous tissue is typically associated with changes in collagen components, e. g. deposition of collagen fibrils resulting from an increased number of fibroblasts [104].…”

Characterization of porous media based on the polarimetric matrix models

“…The results recently obtained in polarimetry clearly demonstrate the availability of polarimetric methods for studying the properties of biological objects [1][2][3]. It is known that biological objects are characterized by complex "polarization behavior" [2].…”

“…The quantities , , 2 1 A A and 3 A in the first row of the matrix (1) are quantitative estimates of depolarization asymmetry for the above three pairs of orthogonal input polarizations.…”

Integrated Mueller-matrix near-infrared imaging and point-wise spectroscopy improves colonic cancer detection

“…4(d)] confirms the significantly increased diattentuation for the colon cancer. One notes that biomolecules such as amino acids, proteins and nucleic acids exhibit diattentuation effects [30]. The higher magnitude observed for the diattentuation of cancerous tissue compared to normal tissue may be due to the enlarged nuclei and increased concentrations of chromatin (hence, nucleic acids) during colonic cancer development [31], which led to the increase in diattentuation effects in colonic cancer.…”