Special Section Guest Editorial: Polarized Light for Biomedical Applications

Mapping of polycrystalline films of biological fluids utilizing the Jones-matrix formalism

“…For bile films the ratio between the intensities of the incident and transmitted forward laser radiation lies in the range 0.92 I/I 0 0.98 ↔ 0.087 τ 0.098. On the basis of equations (6) and 7, the parameters of phase (q ≡ θ, δ) aniso tropy were found for each pixel of the CCD camera. For objective assessment of N histograms of distributions q ≡ θ, δ the set of statistical moments of the first to fourth orders (mean M 1 , dispersion M 2 , skewness M 3 and kurtosis M 4 ) was determined in a similar way to that suggested in [8,9].…”

Polarization gating based on Mueller matrices

“…In the last decades, polarimetric information has proven to be useful for biological tissues inspection [1][2][3]. As a result, polarimetric based techniques are nowadays being applied in multiple scenarios, as for instance, for cancer detection and stage identification [4][5][6][7][8], to enhance image contrast in skin diseases [9][10][11], for human eye examination [12,13], for diabetes diagnosis as well as therapy [14,15], etc.…”

Influence of scattering and birefringence on the phase shift between electric field components of polarized light propagated through biological tissues

“…The use of polarized light in biomedical research has been growing explosively [1]. Recently a number of innovative polarization-based optical modalities have been developed for various biomedical applications in order to improve the accuracy of measurements and enhance the imaging contrast, with an ultimate aim to attain the practical tool for the optical biopsy and functional characterization of biological tissues.…”