Optical Polarization in Biomedical Applications

The second edition of the book published by Springer in 2006, Optical Polarization in Biomedical Applications concerns the optical methods exploring a unique feature of light its polarization - for the quantitative and qualitative characterization of various biological tissues for biomedical diagnostic. It is known that optical polarization is extremely sensitive to tissue microstructure. When pathology starts to develop, it breaks fine structure of tissue. While these changes are not visible with a naked eye at the early stage of disease, probing tissue with polarized light may provide necessary information for the accurate diagnosis and pave a way to the optical biopsy of tissue. Some of polarization sensitive optical methods have already found their place in clinical practice (e. g. polarization sensitive optical coherence tomography (PS-OCT) in ophthalmology, polarized light microscopy in dentistry), others polarization sensitive methods are still in exploratory stage, but may become breakthrough techniques in different domains of medicine in nearest future (e. g. Stokes and Mueller polarimetry in gynecology, laparoscopic surgery, neurosurgery).

An increase of research activities in the domain of optical polarization methods for biomedical applications has occurred in recent years as evidenced by the large number of relevant publications. Last years the seminal contributions were made to the domain of polarimetric data interpretation helping to discriminate between normal and pathological tissues: extension of Monte Carlo algorithm for a modeling of polarized light propagation in scattering anisotropic media, development of Mueller matrix differential formalism of homogenous fluctuating media for a statistical interpretation of depolarization and polarization properties of studied sample. These developments help to find the optimal optical markers with an improved detection performance for any specific type of disease. These findings are of interest for optical engineers working on a design of new polarimetric instruments and clinicians looking for new revolutionary approaches to address diagnostic challenges. The probing of tissue with optical polarization is also of great interest for researchers and students in biology, since it allows evaluating the presence of microstructural features (extracellular collagen matrix, cell s nuclei and organelles) and their effective size for the assessment of tissue integrity.

The authors discuss the principles and concepts of tissue optical clearing, orbital angular momentum and quantum entangled photons in tissue polarization optics, polarization encoding and DNA-associated symbolic sequence mapping, and machine learning for pathology feature extraction in Mueller polarimetry.

The book contains images of studied tissues and phantoms as well as the figures with the schematic of experimental setups. Graphs and tables are included to show the numerical results obtained by calculations, or results of analysis of experimental data. This volume includes a special focus on the recent studies dedicated to the theoretical and instrumental developments in the framework adaptive Mueller polarimetry and its potential transfer to the clinical settings. The new edition of present book will present these new topics and complete the existing ones with the newest developments in the field.