Mapping local orientation of aligned fibrous scatterers for cancerous tissues using backscattering Mueller matrix imaging

Abstract

Abstract. Polarization measurements are sensitive to the microstructure of tissues and can be used to detect pathological changes. Many tissues contain anisotropic fibrous structures. We obtain the local orientation of aligned fibrous scatterers using different groups of the backscattering Mueller matrix elements. Experiments on concentrically well-aligned silk fibers and unstained human papillary thyroid carcinoma tissues show that the m22, m33, m23, and m32 elements have better contrast but higher degeneracy for the extraction of orientation angles. The m12 and m13 elements show lower contrast, but allow us to determine the orientation angle for the fibrous scatterers along all directions. Moreover, Monte Carlo simulations based on the sphere-cylinder scattering model indicate that the oblique incidence of the illumination beam introduces some errors in the orientation angles obtained by both methods. Mapping the local orientation of anisotropic tissues may not only provide information on pathological changes, but can also give new leads to reduce the orientation dependence of polarization measurements. © The Authors. Published by SPIE under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported License. Distribution or reproduction of this work in whole or in part requires full attribution of the original publication, including its DOI.

Mueller polarimetric imaging for surgical and diagnostic applications: a review

“…Besides the decomposition methods reviewed in the previous sections, Mueller matrix transformation techniques have also been introduced recently to address this issue and have been validated and used in 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50 51 52 53 54 55 56 a number of biological tissue studies [125][126][127][128][129][130][131]. The following rotation-independent parameters were proposed based on experimental data and simulation result analysis…”

“…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].…”

“…A number of methods including Lu-Chipman's polar decomposition [31], reverse polar decomposition [116], symmetric decomposition [117], differential decomposition [118][119][120][121][122][123] and root decomposition [37,124], Mueller matrix transformation techniques [125][126][127][128][129][130][131], Cloude's sum decomposition [132], serial parallel decomposition [133], etc. have been developed.…”

Characterizing microstructures of cancerous tissues using multispectral transformed Mueller matrix polarization parameters

“…Such cancer induced changes are explained by the reduction of birefringence in the interstitial medium [10] or the breaking down of the well-ordered fibrous structure [25]. For the papillary thyroid carcinoma tissues however, the development for the cancer cells is accompanied by inflammatory reactions and fibrosis formations in the surrounding tissues [12,26], leading to an increase in the anisotropy parameter A from MMT. Since transmission microscopic images of thin tissue slices are often used in pathologic diagnosis, in this paper we adopt the forward scattering configuration for easier comparisons between the polarization images and the colored transmission images of the stained pathologic slides.…”

H-scan analysis of thyroid lesions

“…Certain chemical and molecular changes in the nucleus and cell morphology are seen in papillary thyroid carcinoma variants, and these changes have been characterized by scattering properties. [12][13][14] In a population-based study by Smith-Bindman et al, 15 microcalcifications were associated with 38.2% of malignant nodules and 5.4% of benign nodules. Models for classifying microcalcifications as elastic scatterers under ultrasound have been studied previously.…”