Toward the development of a polarimetric tool to diagnose the fibrotic human ventricular myocardium

Abstract

Significance: Optical polarimetry is an emerging modality that effectively quantifies the bulk optical properties that correlate with the anisotropic structural properties of cardiac tissues. We demonstrate the application of a polarimetric tool for characterizing healthy and fibrotic human myocardial tissues efficiently with a high degree of accuracy. Aim:The study was aimed to characterize the myocardial tissues from the left ventricle and right ventricle of N ¼ 7 control and N ¼ 10 diseased subjects. The diseased subjects were composed of two groups: N ¼ 7 with rheumatic heart disease (RHD) and N ¼ 3 with myxomatous valve (MV) disease.Approach: A portable, affordable, and accurate linear polarization-based diagnostic tool is developed to measure the degree of linear polarization (DOLP) of the myocardial tissues while working at a wavelength of 850 nm.Results: The sensitivity, specificity, and accuracy of the polarimetric tool in distinguishing the control group from the RHD group were found to be 73.33%, 76.92%, and 75%, respectively, and from the MV group were 91.6%, 62.5%, and 80%, respectively, which demonstrates the efficacy of the polarimetric tool to distinguish the healthy myocardial tissues from diseased tissues. Conclusions:We have successfully developed a polarimetric tool that can aid cardiologists in characterizing the myocardial tissues in conjunction with endomyocardial biopsy. This work should be followed up with experiments on a large cohort of control and diseased subjects. We intend to create and develop a probe to quantify the DOLP of in vivo heart tissue during surgery.

Exploring the unique and coupled effects between birefringence and scattering via a novel approach

“…Compared to conventional imaging techniques, polarization imaging has seen rapid development in recent years in the field of biomedicine due to its label-free nature, low dependence on resolution, sensitivity to subwavelength structures, and high information dimensionality [1][2][3][4][5][6][7] . This has been particularly evident in applications such as imaging of tissues including breast cancer 8 , cervical cancer [9][10][11] , thyroid cancer 10,12 , skin cancer 13 , liver fibrosis 14,15 , colon cancer 16 , bladder cancer 17 ,lung cancer 18 , and bulk tissues 9,19,20 . Owing to its additive properties, polarization can be easily integrated with established diagnostic and imaging methodologies.…”