Use of polar decomposition for the diagnosis of oral precancer

Abstract

The Mueller matrix describes all the polarizing properties of a sample and, therefore, the optical differences between noncancerous and precancerous tissue that may be present within the matrix elements. A high-speed polarimetry system that generates 16 ͑4 ϫ 4͒ full Mueller matrices to characterize tissues is presented. Feature extraction is done on the Mueller matrix elements resulting in depolarization and retardance images by polar decomposition. These are used to detect and classify early oral cancers and precancerous changes in epithelium such as dysplasia. These images are compared with orthogonal polarization images and analyzed in an attempt to identity useful factors for the differentiation between cancerous lesions and their benign counterparts. Our results indicate that polarimetry has potential as a method for the in vivo early detection and diagnosis of oral premalignancy.

Mueller polarimetric imaging for surgical and diagnostic applications: a review

“…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.…”

The polar decomposition method in the polarimetric study of light scattered by deterministic profiles and dense media

“…La simulación del comportamiento de los tejidos biológicos para la obtención de datos "in vivo", está siendo el objeto de diversos análisis polarimétricos recientes en grupos de investigación dedicados a biología y medicina [5,11]. El carácter quiral y de medio denso (es decir, dispersor y selectivamente absorbente) de los tejidos puede ser simulado mediante disolución de sales o azúcares en sustancias que contienen partículas en suspensión.…”

“…La DP viene siendo utilizada en distintas disciplinas, como la medicina [5], la polarimetría de imagen [6] o en la caracterización de componentes polarimétricos [7] y superficies estructuradas [8]. En este estudio, la DP se aplicará a dos tipos de sistemas:…”

Turbid medium polarimetry in biomedical imaging and diagnosis

“…Each of these, if separately extracted and quantified, holds promise as a useful biological metric. Several studies have therefore addressed birefringence measurement for the detection of tissue abnormalities such as osteoarthritis, thermal injury (burns), and the numerous types of carcinomas (like basal cell, squamous cell carcinoma) [8,9,64,65]. The prospect of noninvasive glucose detection via turbid polarimetry is also being evaluated by several groups [9,34].…”

“…Chung et al [64], Manhas et al [73] and Anastasiadou et al [74] have explored the use of the Mueller matrix decomposition approach for diagnosis of oral cancer and cervical cancer respectively. Interesting differences have been reported by them in the Mueller matrix-decomposed values for linear retardance (δ) and depolarization coefficient (Δ) for the cancerous and the normal tissues, indicating the potential of Mueller matrix polarimetry for non-invasive and early diagnosis of cancer.…”