Spectropolarimetric imaging for pathological analysis of skin

Pathological changes of skin will change the tissue's birefringence and structure, which can be measured by the polarization and spectral changes of the tissue's scattering light. Light-scattering spectropolarimetry is an effective tool to measure these features for quantitative pathology analysis. An epithelial tissue imaging spectropolarimeter is proposed to acquire the spectral, polarimetric, and spatial characteristic changes of the tissue, and then a spectropolarimetric correction method is proposed to compute the tissue's polarimetric spectrum, which can be used for pathological analysis of tissue. Finally, to aid doctors for more accurate clinical diagnosis, a false color mapping based spectropolarimetric image fusion method is proposed to enhance the visual differences between normal skin and pathological skin. Experimental results demonstrate the potential of the proposed techniques for pathological diagnosis and treatment evaluation of skin. (C) 2009 Optical Society of America