Modular Mueller Matrix Microscope And Its Application

Polarization imaging methods have many unique advantages,such as non-invasive,non-destructive,sensitive to subwavelength microstructure,capable of providing huge amount of potential information and so on,showing an attractive prospect of potential applications in biomedical studies.In addition,the polarization measurement method is compatible with the existing optical techniques,therefore,by adding suitable polarizing optics components,the polarizing optical systems can be achieved.Mueller matrix imaging,which can provide all the information of the sample’s polarization characteristics,has caught more extensive attention.With the continuous development of the Mueller matrix measurement and analysis methods,its enormous potential applications in the diagnosis of cancer begin to gradually appear.Nowadays,considering that cancer incidence rates increasing rapidly,Mueller matrix microscopic imaging has become one of the market demands.However,the current domestic and international studies on the subject of the Mueller matrix are still relatively insufficient,so there is not yet mature business instrument capable of accomplishing Mueller matrix microscopic imaging.The most successful commercial products are Abrio and its follow-up products,but they are mainly applied to measure weak-scattering samples.Moreover,compared with Mueller matrix measurement,these equipments can only get partial polarization information of samples and are not appropriate to measure strong-scattering samples such as biological tissues quantitatively.Therefore,in this thesis,we design a modular Mueller matrix microscope based on our group’s previous studies,by adding a set of polarization states generator and analyzer(PSG and PSA)to an ordinary commercial optical microscope,and show the potential applications of this Mueller matrix microscope in the biomedical studies preliminary.In this thesis,we first complete the design and construction of modular Mueller matrix microscope,then the equipment is optimized and calibrated to improve its reliability and accuracy of measurement,laying the foundations for practical applications of this microscope.We take full advantage of polarization method’s compatibility,introducing the idea of modularity,and determine the program of data measuring and processing by comparative analysis.Meanwhile,we study and design each module from both the aspects of hardware and software,and study the corresponding error analysis,optimization and calibration methods.Finally we develop a fully automated measurement-processing-presentation system of Mueller matrix microscopic imaging.Subsequently,modular Mueller matrix microscope is applied to many different microscopic samples including marine micro-organisms,chemicals,human cancer tissues.Through qualitative and quantitative analysis and Monte Carlo simulations,the results show that the Mueller matrix imaging parameters can reflect different structural characteristics of biological tissues and the modular Mueller matrix microscope can be potentially applied to the observations of marine microbial characteristics,the distinction between chemical material samples and the detection of cancers.