Polarimetric measurement utility for pre-cancer detection from uterine cervix specimens

Abstract

Prior work demonstrated significant contrast in visible wavelength Mueller matrix images for healthy and pre-cancerous regions of excised cervical tissue. This work demonstrates post-processing compressions of the full Mueller matrix that preserve detection performance. The purpose of this post-processing is to understand polarimetric measurement utility for computing mathematical observers and designing future imaging protocols. The detection performance of the full Mueller matrix, and both linear and non-linear parameters of the Mueller matrix will be compared. The area under the receiver operating characteristic (ROC) curve, otherwise known as the AUC, is the gold standard metric to quantify detection performance in medical applications. An AUC = 1 is perfect detection and AUC = 0.5 is the performance of guessing. Either the scalar retardance or the 3 smallest eigenvalues of the coherency matrix yield an average AUC of 0.94 or 0.93, respectively. When these four non-linear parameters are used simultaneously the average AUC is 0.95. The J-optimal Channelized Quadratic Observer (J-CQO) method for optimizing polarimetric measurements demonstrates equivalent AUC values for the full Muller matrix and 6 J-CQO optimized measurements. The advantage of this optimization is that only 6 measurements, instead of 16 for the full Mueller matrix, are required to achieve this AUC.

Evaluating β-amyloidosis progression in Alzheimer’s disease with Mueller polarimetry

“…All elements of MM are real numbers, MM contains full information on polarimetric properties of the sample in the absence of non-linear effects. In the recently published studies, MM polarimetry has been applied to differentiating the polycrystalline structure of healthy and pathologically altered tissues of myocardium [13], characterization of rectum wall tissue, vaginal wall during genital prolapse, brain tissue [14], detection of healthy and pre-cancerous regions of uterine cervix tissue [15][16][17], blood films characterization for cancer diagnosis [18], detection of cancer of colorectal tissue [19,20] and characterization of other tissues [21,22]. Other polarization-based techniques, such as Stokes polarimetry based on circularly polarized illumination [23,24], Jones-matrix tomography [25,26], Stokes correlometry [27] were also widely used for the characterization of various tissues.…”

Mapping of retardance, diattenuation and polarizance vector on Poincare sphere for diagnosis and classification of cervical precancer

“…Various imaging techniques, primarily based on transmission, absorption, reflection, spontaneous emission and scattering in light‐tissue interactions, have shown to be responsive to a number of subtle alterations in various diseased tissue. Mueller matrix (MM) polarimetric imaging based on the acquisition of 16 images has shown tremendous potential in precancer detection since the last decade and is best suited for a complete characterization of the biological specimen . These MM images are further processed to extract the essential optical parameters, namely, diattenuation, retardation and depolarization through Lu‐Chipman decomposition method .…”

Digital histology with Mueller microscopy: how to mitigate an impact of tissue cut thickness fluctuations

“…suggests using them as optical markers for diagnostics in clinical settings. [1][2][3][4][5] However, using these parameters for diagnostics requires (i) understanding the fundamental processes of interaction of polarized light with tissue and (ii) finding the optimal set of optical parameters, which will increase the accuracy of diagnostics.…”

“…These instruments may operate in a spectroscopic or angular-resolved mode 7,8 and may also provide both microscopic (few hundreds of μm 2 ) and macroscopic (few cm 2 ) polarimetric images of the sample. [2][3][4]5,9,10 MM contains all information on polarimetric and depolarizing properties of a sample. However, a straightforward physical interpretation of MM elements is possible for a quite limited set of samples like basic polarimetric elements (polarizers and wave plates) and partial depolarizers.…”