Laser polarimetry of the orientation structure of bone tissue osteons

A matrix method is proposed for describing polarization properties of biological tissues as an aggregate of uniaxial crystal structures. We investigated 25 µm-thick histological sections of compact bone tissue which provided single light scattering. It is shown that in this case there exists a unique relationship between the polarization parameters of the boundary laser field and the parameters of anisotropy and orientation of the structural elements of biological tissue. On this basis, contactless methods of laser polarimetry of histological sections of bone tissue have been proposed.