Optical image quality improvement based on time-resolved stokes vectors in filamentous tissues

We first demonstrated the effectiveness of imaging in a tissue phantom with isotropic scattering by using polarization discrimination combined with the time gating method. In this situation with lean pork as targets and diluted milk as tissue phantom, the reduced scattering coefficient mapping manifests clear images. However, such an imaging technique became less effective in filamentous tissues, such as chicken breast tissues, because filamentous tissue had a deterministically anisotropic property. It led to coherent coupling between the two linear polarization components. In this situation, we employed the time-gated degree of polarization (DOP) imaging technique that based on the Stokes formalism. The results showed that the DOP measurement was quite effective in high-quality imaging of objects in filamentous tissues. The improvement of this method was attributed to the unchanged polarization part under the coupling processes of various polarization components.