Mueller-matrix characterization of biological tissues

Abstract

Various kinds of abnormalities and pathologies result in changes of the structural properties of collagen and other fibrous biological tissues, thereby leading to significant alterations of their morphological and anisotropic properties. The Mueller matrix contains all the optical information that one can obtain from light scattered by a medium and, therefore, shows great promise for the efficient use of polarization parameters in the characterization of sizes, shapes, and orientations of tissue structural elements as well as the birefringence, dichroism, depolarization, etc. of biological tissues. The extraction of this information via the interpretation of experimental results of Mueller-matrix measurements represents an important challenge, especially when the various tissue properties must be characterized simultaneously. The purpose of this chapter is to (i) present, in a systematic way, the main properties of Mueller and Jones matrices that can be experimentally or numerically derived, and (ii) provide a review of the information content of Mueller matrices for biological tissues in the framework of models according to which a tissue is a discrete ensemble of scatterers or a continuous distribution of optical parameters. © Springer Science+Business Media B.V. 2011.