Investigation on the potential of Mueller matrix imaging for digital staining

Abstract

Digital staining based on Mueller matrix measurements and their derivatives was investigated. Mueller matrix imaging was performed at the microscopic level on gastric tissue sections. Full Mueller matrices (4 × 4) were reconstructed using recorded images, followed by the extraction of polarization parameters. The most effective parameters and their combinations were extracted from Mueller matrix elements, principal component scores and polarization parameters respectively to classify samples into three categories - i.e. cancer, dysplasia and intestinal metaplasia/normal glands for various regions of interest sizes. It was observed that two-step classification yielded higher classification accuracy than the traditional one-step classification and that pixel classification based on Mueller matrix elements yielded higher accuracy than that based on polarization parameters and derived principal components. Moreover, Mueller matrix images with a lower spatial resolution generated higher classification accuracy but those with a higher spatial resolution revealed more morphological details.ns. The original stained image (top) and the digital staining image (bottom).

Mueller polarimetric imaging for surgical and diagnostic applications: a review

“…A number of applications of Mueller polarimetric imaging are instead based on detecting unstained thin tissue cuts [22,131,144,[158][159][160][161][162] in a transmission geometry. Since Haematoxylin and Eosin (H&E) staining and other staining techniques require time and elaborate sample preparation by a well-trained and experienced pathologist for diagnosis, unstained Mueller microscopy may be used for rapid and low cost pathological inspection [159,160] and instant tissue characterization [136,163]. As shown in Figure 2(b), polarimetric imaging has been utilized to guide scanning mass spectroscopic analysis of a pathological slide of breast cancer tissue to detect suspicious cancerous regions.…”

Advanced endoscopic imaging in gastric neoplasia and preneoplasia

“…Subsequent Wang et al 57 demonstrated the potential of polarimetry imaging for gastric tissue diagnosis at the microscopic level, whereby polarimetry was used to diagnose between normal gastric tissue, intestinal metaplasia, dysplasia and cancer, in a total of 84 samples for 59 patients. The accuracy of classification in digital staining using polarimetry imaging on the microscopic level varied from 56–75% for the discrimination of cancer, dysplasia and intestinal metaplasia or normal tissue.…”

Third‐harmonic generation imaging of breast tissue biopsies

“…To circumvent this, chemical imaging techniques such as Fourier‐transform infrared spectroscopic imaging have been developed as a label‐free modality that utilize computerized algorithms to digitally recognize the biochemical composition of the underlying tissue structure (Mayerich et al ., ; Tiwari & Bhargava, ). In addition, recently researchers have also focused on developing digital staining methods to facilitate morphological assessment from images of unstained tissues (Bautista et al ., ; Amrania et al ., ; Wang et al ., ). In this paper, we introduce third‐harmonic generation (THG) imaging as a potential label‐free imaging technique to facilitate analysis of breast tumour tissue biopsies.…”