Optical Polarization in Biomedical Applications

The second edition of the book published by Springer in 2006, Optical Polarization in Biomedical Applications concerns the optical methods exploring a unique feature of light —its polarization—for quantitative tissue characterization. The new edition will introduce new topics and expand on existing, cutting-edge developments in this field. Particular attention is paid to recent theoretical and instrumental advances in Mueller polarimetry and their potential clinical applications, a discussion of the principles and concepts of optical tissue clearing, orbital angular momentum, and quantum entangled photons in tissue polarization optics, polarization encoding and symbolic mapping of DNA sequences, and machine learning for pathology signature extraction.

Some polarization-sensitive optical methods have already found clinical application, while others are still in the research phase but could become breakthrough technologies in various medical fields in the near future. Recent developments in Stokes-Muller polarimetry have led to extensive ex vivo and in vivo studies of various tissues. Important advances have been made in the field of matrix Mueller algebra for post-processing of diagnostic data, in the extension of the polarization Monte Carlo method to the study of scattering anisotropic media for the purpose of simulating the interaction of polarized light with tissue, and in the search for optimal optical markers for certain types of pathologies. These results are of interest to optical engineers, researchers, students, and clinicians seeking new, revolutionary approaches to solving diagnostic problems by assessing the presence of microstructural features to determine tissue integrity and in the development of new polarimetric technologies.

Valery V. Tuchin is the Head of the Department of Optics and Biophotonics and the Science Medical Center of Saratov State University, the Laboratory of Biophotonics of Tomsk State University and the Laboratory of Laser Diagnostics of Technical and Living Systems of the Institute of Precision Mechanics and Control of the Federal Research Center “Saratov Scientific Center of the Russian Academy of Sciences,” Russia. His research interests include tissue optics, tissue optical clearing, laser medicine and nanobiophotonics. Professor Tuchin is a Corresponding Member of the Russian Academy of Sciences, a Fellow of SPIE and OSA/OPTICA. He is an Honored Scientist of the Russian Federation, FiDiPro (Finland), a laureate of the SPIE Educator Award, the J.W. Goodman Book Writing Award, the M.S. Feld Prize in Biophotonics, and the Chime Bell Award of the Chinese province of Hubei. He has the title of “Professor of the Year” in Russia, the title of “Scientist of the Year” of the “Vyzov” Foundation, and has been awarded the D.S. Rozhdestvensky, S.I. Vavilov and A.M. Prokhorov medals and has many other awards. He is the founder, editor-in-chief and member of the editorial board of many journals in the field of biomedical optics, biophotonics and biomedical engineering, and the founder and chair of several world-renowned international conferences. He has published more than 40 books and 1000 papers, which have been cited more than 46,300 times.

Tatiana Novikova received her M.S. degree (Cum Laude) in Applied Mathematics from Moscow State University, Russia, a Ph.D. in Applied Physics and Mathematics from Moscow Institute of Mathematical Modeling, Russian Academy of Sciences, and an HDR (Dr. habil.) in Physics from Paris-Sud University, Orsay, France. She leads the Characterization and Modeling Division of the Laboratory of Interfaces and Thin Films at Ecole polytechnique, IP Paris, France, and also serves as a Courtesy Professor in the Department of Biomedical Engineering at Florida International University, Miami, USA. Her research interests and expertise include optical polarization, Mueller polarimetry, biomedical imaging, clinical applications of polarized light, optical metrology, and computational modeling of electromagnetic wave interaction with structured and random media. Dr Novikova is an editorial board member of the SPIE
Journal of Biomedical Optics, Vice-Chair of the Poincaré Webinar Series “Optical Polarization and Related Phenomena”, the co-founder and chair of both SPIE Photonics West BiOS symposium “Polarized light and Optical Angular Momentum for biomedical diagnostics” and International Workshop “Biophotonics and Optical Angular Momentum”. Dr. Novikova is a Fellow of SPIE and OPTICA/OSA and a recipient of the 2020 SPIE G.G. Stokes Award in Optical Polarization.

Lihong Wang edited the first book on photoacoustic tomography. His book entitled “Biomedical Optics: Principles and Imaging,” one of the first textbooks in the field, won the 2010 Joseph W. Goodman Book Writing Award. He has published 615 peer-reviewed journal articles and delivered 630 keynote/plenary/invited talks. His Google Scholar h-index and citations have reached 166 and 118,000, #1 most cited in optics according to Stanford/Elsevier. His laboratory was the first to report functional photoacoustic tomography, 3D photoacoustic microscopy, photoacoustic endoscopy, photoacoustic reporter gene imaging, the universal photoacoustic reconstruction algorithm, and CUP (world’s fastest camera). He chairs the annual conference on Photons plus Ultrasound, the largest conference at Photonics West. He was the Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of Biomedical Optics. He received the NIH Director’s Pioneer, NIH Director’s Transformative Research, and NIH/NCI Outstanding Investigator awards. He also received the OSA C.E.K. Mees Medal, IEEE Technical Achievement Award, IEEE Biomedical Engineering Award, SPIE Britton Chance Biomedical Optics Award, IPPA Senior Prize, and OSA Michael S. Feld Biophotonics Award. He is a Fellow of the AAAS, AIMBE, Electromagnetics Academy, IAMBE, IEEE, NAI, OSA, and SPIE as well as a Foreign Fellow of COS. An honorary doctorate was conferred on him by Lund University, Sweden. He was inducted into the National Academy of Engineering and the National Academy of Medicine.

Dmitry A. Zimnyakov is the Doctor of Sciences in Physics and Mathematics, Professor, Head of the Physics Department of Yury Gagarin State Technical University of Saratov, and the Chief Researcher in the Institute of Precision Mechanics and Control of the Federal Research Center “Saratov Scientific Center of the Russian Academy of Sciences,” Russia. His scientific interests are in the fields of statistical optics, laser physics, condensed matter physics, material science, and biophotonics. Prof. Zimnyakov is the Senior Member of the OSA/OPTICA Society and the Honorary Worker of Higher Education of the Russian Federation. He is the author and co-author of more than 300 scientific papers, monographs, textbooks and tutorials and supervisor of 16 PhD dissertations.

Hui Ma is a professor in the Shenzhen International Graduate School, Tsinghua University. He is also the director of Shenzhen Key Laboratory of Optical Imaging and Sensing and director of Guangdong Engineering Center for Polarization Imaging and Sensing. His research interests are optical polarization techniques and applications, including polarized photon scattering in turbid media, Mueller matrix imaging and microscopy, data techniques for polarization feature extraction, and biomedical applications of these techniques for the characterization or differentiation of cells and tissues.

Marina V. Alonova is an Associate Professor of the Physics Department at the Yuri Gagarin State Technical University of Saratov, deputy director of the Physics and Technology Institute for research. Candidate of physical and mathematical sciences, scientific secretary of the dissertation council of the Yuri Gagarin State Technical University of Saratov. Has over 60 scientific publications. Research interests: laser physics, mathematical modeling, and tissue optics.

Jiachen Wan is a postdoctoral research fellow at Massachusetts General Hospital and Harvard Medical School, Athinoula A. Martinos Center for Biomedical Imaging. He earned dual bachelor’s degrees in physics and mathematics from the University of Toronto, a master’s degree in applied physics from New York University, and completed Ph.D. training in Biomedical Engineering from Tsinghua University. His research interests include polarization imaging, Mueller matrix microscopy, polarization sensitive optical coherence tomography, machine learning, polarization based digital pathology, and neural imaging.