Submicron scale tissue multifractal anisotropy in polarized laser light scattering

Abstract

A number of disordered systems exhibit local anisotropy in the fractal or multifractal correlation and in the resulting scaling behavior, which contain wealth of information on the system. Here, we demonstrate that the spatial dielectric fluctuations in a random medium like biological tissue exhibit such multifractal anisotropy, leaving its unique signature in the wavelength variation of the light scattering Mueller matrix and manifesting as an intriguing spectral diattenuation effect.We have thus developed an inverse analysis method for the quantification of the multifractal anisotropy from the scattering Mueller matrix. The method is based on processing the relevant Mueller matrix elements in Fourier domain using Born approximation followed by multifractal analysis. Application of this technique on tissues of human cervix ex vivo demonstrate the potential of the multifractal anisotropy parameters as novel biomarkers for screening subtle micro-structural changes associated with precancers. Sensing structural anisotropy in the submicron length scale via the multifractal anisotropy parameters may prove valuable for noninvasive characterization of a wide class of complex materials and disordered scattering media.

Characterization of nanosensitive multifractality in submicron scale tissue morphology and its alteration in tumor progression

“… 23 In addition, biological tissue is known to have submicron structural multifractality. 24 – 28 Although, these studies are based on superficial detection and do not provide underlying tissue multifractality. Multifractality is a special class of self-similarity where multiple scaling exponents (generalized Hurst exponents) are extracted to quantify existing multifractality in a complex system.…”

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

“…The Stokes vector components (second and third components) deal with azimuth and ellipticity along with estimation of the polarization ellipticity through the fourth component of Stokes vector. The normal and diabetic kidney samples are well differentiated through the Stokes‐correlometry parameters dealing with phase and modulus of the polarization inhomogeneous images for the kidney samples of both type of tissue where the phase shift change is observed due to the various size of the birefringent fibrils and their curvilinearity and shows the fractal nature of the specimen. In this study, the different nature of refractive index of the biological specimen for the linear, linear‐45 and circular polarization has not taken into consideration.…”

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.…”