Ex-vivo characterization of human healthy colon and colorectal cancer by multispectral Mueller polarimetric imaging and its polar decomposition

Mueller matrix polarimetric imaging (MMPI) provides precise microstructural information of biological samples and has been applied to the detections of various abnormal tissues. Once the Mueller matrix is determined for a particular anisotropic material, polar decomposition is applied to determine the singular values of optical anisotropies, such as depolarization, diattenuation, retardance and optical rotation. In this work, ex-vivo cancerous and noncancerous tissues were imaged by the MMPI technique using 3 different radiation wavelengths (460, 532 and 633 nm). The samples under study were cancerous and noncancerous tissues from colon. The results show that the optical anisotropies from biological samples are different. As we know, cancer changes the structure and concentration of biomedical substances from healthy tissue. One of the structures that is affected by cancer is collagen. This structure contributes to the diatenuation and retardance values. Therefore the values of diatenuation and retardance are different from the malignant and healthy tissues. We demonstrate that MMPI and polar decomposition are useful tools to discriminate healthy tissue and cancerous tissue from different parts of the body.