Polarimetric measurement utility for pre-cancer detection from uterine cervix specimens

Prior work demonstrated significant contrast in visible wavelength Mueller matrix images for healthy and pre-cancerous regions of excised cervical tissue. This work demonstrates post-processing compressions of the full Mueller matrix that preserve detection performance. The purpose of this post-processing is to understand polarimetric measurement utility for computing mathematical observers and designing future imaging protocols. The detection performance of the full Mueller matrix, and both linear and non-linear parameters of the Mueller matrix will be compared. The area under the receiver operating characteristic (ROC) curve, otherwise known as the AUC, is the gold standard metric to quantify detection performance in medical applications. An AUC = 1 is perfect detection and AUC = 0.5 is the performance of guessing. Either the scalar retardance or the 3 smallest eigenvalues of the coherency matrix yield an average AUC of 0.94 or 0.93, respectively. When these four non-linear parameters are used simultaneously the average AUC is 0.95. The J-optimal Channelized Quadratic Observer (J-CQO) method for optimizing polarimetric measurements demonstrates equivalent AUC values for the full Muller matrix and 6 J-CQO optimized measurements. The advantage of this optimization is that only 6 measurements, instead of 16 for the full Mueller matrix, are required to achieve this AUC.