Polarimetric imaging of biological tissues based on the indices of polarimetric purity

Abstract

We highlight the interest of using the indices of polarimetric purity (IPPs) to the inspection of biological tissues. The IPPs were recently proposed in the literature and they result in a further synthetization of the depolarizing properties of samples. Compared with standard polarimetric images of biological samples, IPP-based images lead to larger image contrast of some biological structures and to a further physical interpretation of the depolarizing mechanisms inherent to the samples. In addition, unlike other methods, their calculation do not require advanced algebraic operations (as is the case of polar decompositions), and they result in 3 indicators of easy implementation. We also propose a pseudo-colored encoding of the IPP information that leads to an improved visualization of samples. This last technique opens the possibility of tailored adjustment of tissues contrast by using customized pseudo-colored images. The potential of the IPP approach is experimentally highlighted along the manuscript by studying 3 different ex-vivo samples. A significant image contrast enhancement is obtained by using the IPP-based methods, compared to standard polarimetric images.

Keywords: Mueller matrix; biological tissue; biomedical; depolarization; imaging; polarimetry.