Biomedical Diagnostic With Diffusely Backscattered Linearly And Circularly Polarized Light

We report on the development of a method that records spatially dependent intensity patterns of polarized Light that is diffusely backscattered from turbid materials. It is demonstrated that these intensity patterns can be used to differentiate between suspensions of cancerous and noncancerous cells and to observe different metabolic cell processes. Our technique employs polarized light from a He-Ne laser (lambda = 513 nm), which is focused onto the surface of the scattering medium. A surface area of approximately 4 x 4 cm around the light input point is imaged through polarization-analysis optics onto a CCD camera One can observe a manifold of intensity patterns by varying the polarization state of the incident laser light and changing the analyzer configuration to detect different polarization components of the backscattered light Introducing the Mueller-matrix concept for diffusely backscattered light, a framework is provided to select a subset of measurements which comprehensively describe the optical properties of backscattering media.