Geometric phase in PS-OCT for deep accurate analysis of transparent biological anisotropic tissues

Abstract

Possibilities of geometric phase using in low-coherence polarization-sensitive tomography tasks for noninvasive diagnostics of surface (subsurface) layers of transparent biological media (samples and tissues) are considered. Determination of the object fields’ geometric phase in the modified Mach-Zehnder interferometer allows one to reproduce the geometric structure (optical axis/collagen orientation) of birefringent biological medium. Polarization-interference noninvasive approach of diagnostics the collagen orientation structure of thin nanosized surface tissue layers is proposed at the first time. It is shown, that taking into account the information about top (surface) layer structure can significantly improve the accuracy of deeper (subsurface) layers parameters estimation. The proposed solution is a unique feature that is not accessible in classical polarization-sensitive techniques of information recovery on tissue structure.