Open AccessProbing variations of fibrous structures during the development of breast ductal carcinoma tissues via Mueller matrix imaging
Author(s) -
Yonggui Dong,
Shaoxiong Liu,
YuanYue Shen,
Honghui He,
Hui Ma
Publication year - 2020
Publication title -
biomedical optics express
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 1.362
H-Index - 86
ISSN - 2156-7085
DOI - 10.1364/boe.397441
Subject(s) - mueller calculus , ductal carcinoma , matrix (chemical analysis) , breast carcinoma , feature (linguistics) , pathology , computer science , breast cancer , pattern recognition (psychology) , materials science , biomedical engineering , artificial intelligence , optics , medicine , physics , cancer , scattering , composite material , linguistics , philosophy , polarimetry
Recently, we developed a label-free method to probe the microstructural information and optical properties of unstained thin tissue slices based on microscopic Mueller matrix imaging technique. In this paper, we take the microscopic Mueller matrix images of human breast ductal carcinoma tissue samples at different pathological stages, and then calculate and analyze their retardance-related Mueller matrix-derived parameters. To reveal the microstructural features more quantitatively and precisely, we propose a new method based on first-order statistical properties of image to transform the 2D images of Mueller matrix parameters into several statistical feature vectors. We evaluate each statistical feature vector by corresponding classification characteristic value extracted from the statistical features of Mueller matrix parameters images of healthy breast duct tissue samples. The experimental results indicate that these statistical feature vectors of Mueller matrix derived parameters may become powerful tools to quantitatively characterize breast ductal carcinoma tissue samples at different pathological stages. It has the potential to facilitate automating the staging process of breast ductal carcinoma tissue, resulting in the improvement of diagnostic efficiency.