Visualization of the comprehensive birefringent information in polarization-sensitive optical coherence tomography (Conference Presentation)

We propose a novel method to visualize the integrated birefringence information for polarization-sensitive optical coherence tomography (PS-OCT) of biological tissue. A strategy that integrates the comprehensive birefringence property in a resultant image is introduced to obtain high contrast images of the birefringent samples. Then, color-based automatic segmentation of birefringent components from 3D scanned tissue volume is proposed to isolate the 3D network of the nerve bundles in a whole mouse brain. Experimental validation and demonstrations are given by imaging ex vivo mouse tail and whole brain tissues to show the usefulness of proposed comprehensive birefringent imaging and segmentation methods. These results sufficiently demonstrate the practical usefulness of the proposed strategy of using comprehensive polarization as the imaging parameter in the PS-OCT imaging of biological samples, indicating potential applications in both pre-clinical and clinical environments where accurate identification of birefringent tissue components is important, for example the nerve identification in delicate surgical remove of the diseased tissue mass in surgery.