Chia-Wei SUN, Yih-Ming WANG, Chih-Chung YANG^*, Yean-Woei KIANG, Long-Sheng LU¹ and Ming-Jai SU¹

Graduate Institute of Electro-Optical Engineering, Graduate Institute of Communication Engineering and Department of Electrical Engineering, National Taiwan University, 1, Roosevelt Road, Sec. 4, Taipei, Taiwan, R.O.C.
¹Graduate Institute of Pharmacology, National Taiwan University, Taipei, Taiwan, R.O.C.

(Received March 6, 2003; Accepted May 21, 2003)

In this paper we demonstrated the effectiveness of imaging in a tissue phantom with isotropic scattering using polarization discrimination combined with the time gating method. This simple polarization discrimination technique was shown ineffective when it was applied to filamentous tissues. In this situation, we utilized the time-gated degree of polarization (DOP) imaging technique to show that the DOP measurement was quite effective for high-quality imaging of objects in filamentous tissues. We also applied this technique to the characterization of myocardial tissues and showed the difference between normal and abnormal tissues. In addition, we demonstrated a novel method for target depth determination in a turbid medium based on co-polarized light measurements. This method relied on the strong dependence of transmitted co-polarized intensity on target depth.

Key words: time gating, turbid medium, polarization gating, optical imaging, tissue characterization, degree of polarization

^*E-mail address: ccy@cc.ee.ntu.edu.tw