Possible approach to monitoring of the thermal-mediated cartilage reshaping can be based on application of the polarization-sensitive speckle-correlometry. This method deals with correlation analysis of spatial-temporal fluctuations of laser light scattered by modified tissue under the condition of polarization discrimination of detected speckle-modulated scattered optical signals. In the presented paper, various techniques of correlation analysis of polarization-dependent speckle intensity fluctuations are discussed. Experimental results obtained for tissue phantoms and partially denaturated in-vitro tissue samples are presented. The sensitivity of the polarization-dependent correlation functions of the intensity fluctuations of scattered light to the content of denaturated tissue fraction ("amorphous phase") is demonstrated.

Date Published: 9 December 2004
PDF: 8 pages
Proc. SPIE 5578, Photonics North 2004: Photonic Applications in Astronomy, Biomedicine, Imaging, Materials Processing, and Education, (9 December 2004); doi: 10.1117/12.567841

Published in SPIE Proceedings Vol. 5578:
Photonics North 2004: Photonic Applications in Astronomy, Biomedicine, Imaging, Materials Processing, and Education
Marc Nantel; Glen Herriot; Graham H. McKinnon; Leonard MacEachern; Robert A. Weersink; Rejean Munger; Andrew Ridsdale, Editor(s)