Significance: Reflection Mueller matrix imaging is suitable for characterizing the microstructure of bulk specimens and probing dynamic processes in living animals, there are always demands for speed and accuracy for such applications to avoid possible artifacts and reveal a sample’s intrinsic properties.Aim: To demonstrate a design of collinear reflection Mueller matrix fast imaging microscope based on dual division of focal plane (DoFP) polarimeters (DoFPs-CRMMM) which has high measurement speed and accuracy.Approach: In DoFPs-CRMMM, to improve the measurement speed, we applied the dual DoFP polarimeters design on the collinear reflection system for the first time to achieve fast imaging in about 2 s. To improve the measurement accuracy, we improved the double-pass eigenvalue calibration method (dp-ECM) by background light correction, and explored the optimization of the set of reference samples.Results: DoFPs-CRMMM was applied to measure the standard polarization samples and monitor the tissue optical clearing process of an artificial layered bulk tissue. Results show that the system has satisfactory performance which can capture the variation of polarization properties during the dynamic process.Conclusions: We present the establishment and demo application of DoFPs-CRMMM. The measurement speed can be further accelerated for potential applications in monitoring dynamic processes or living biomedical systems.
Compared to traditional optical technology, Mueller matrix imaging can obtain sample’s complete polarization properties, thus can better characterize the microstructure and anisotropy information of the sample. For thick biological tissues or insitu living organs, backscattering Mueller matrix imaging is particularly attractive. In previous studies, we have established the collinear reflection Mueller matrix microscope based on dual rotating retarders (DRR-CRMMM), whose long acquisition time makes it difficult to characterize the polarization properties of the dynamically changing sample. In this paper, we propose and implement a fast collinear reflection Mueller matrix microscope based on dual DoFP polarimeters (DoFPs-CRMMM) and the corresponding calibration scheme to achieve accurate measurements. The system, which takes a Mueller matrix image within a few seconds, is tested for polarization monitoring of biological tissues during tissue optical clearing, and various polarization feature parameters are derived from the Mueller matrix images to reveal the characteristic microstructure variation of the tissues during the dynamic process of tissue optical clearing.
Polarization imaging is a promising technique for probing the microstructures of tissues. Among the available polarimetric techniques, Mueller matrix polarimetry has many distinctive advantages, such as providing label-free and comprehensive descriptions on the properties of biomedical specimens. Recently, for pathological detections we developed a modulus designed Mueller matrix microscope by adding both the polarization states generator (PSG) and analyzer (PSA) to a commercial transmission light microscope. Some preliminary applications on various human cancerous tissues showed that the Mueller matrix microscope can be used to detect the abnormal areas of unstained tissue slices quantitatively. However, whether these parameters are still effective or not for backscattering imaging such as the Mueller matrix endoscope should be analyzed. It is crucial for the future in situ detections using Mueller matrix polarimetry. In this study, we compare these Mueller matrix parameters using the porcine liver tissue samples with appropriate thickness, which can be measured in both transmission and backscattering configurations. The retardancerelated and depolarization-related Mueller matrix imaging parameters between forward and backward imaging results are compared. For a more detailed analysis, we also calculate the indices of polarimetric purity for the depolarizationrelated parameters. The experimental results demonstrate that the retardance-related Mueller matrix parameters have distinct contrasts to characterize the anisotropic and isotropic structures of tissues. However, the contrast mechanisms of the depolarization-related parameters for different tissues still need more studies to confirm.
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