Imaging and visualization of the polarization state of the probing beam in polarization-sensitive optical coherence tomography

We propose a simple and efficient method of color-encoded Stokes parameters to visualize the polarization states for polarization-sensitive optical coherence tomography (PS-OCT) of biological tissue. In this method, polarization states of the probing light are detected and described in the Stokes domain. Three primary colors of red, green, and blue are used to code Stokes parameters of Q, U, and V, respectively, which can be used to represent and visualize each unique polarization state. A strategy that uses the polarization state as the PS-OCT imaging parameter is first 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 network of the 3D nerve bundles in a mouse brain without cutting the brain into slices. Experimental validation and demonstrations are given by imaging ex vivo mouse tail and brain tissues to show the usefulness of proposed polarization state imaging and segmentation methods.