Aplicación de la polarimetría óptica a la caracterización de tejidos biológicos

Abstract

Optical polarization techniques are based on the measurement of the polarization state and the degree of polarization of the light. Recently, Polarization Sensitive OCT (PS-OCT) has been developed to consider the polarization information into the analysis of biological tissues. However, this method works with coherent detection and it does not consider depolarisations caused by the optical media, which could provide much information about their biological and physical properties. In order to correctly characterize optical media in polarization, group theory is employed and Mueller-coherence matrix defined. This matrix can be used to obtain a whole polarization characterization of depolarising biological tissues by means of the entropy factor. An example of its utilization is shown. This method could be an important advance to achieve the optical biopsy.