A dual-modality imaging method based on polarimetry and second harmonic generation

Abstract

Characterization and evaluation of skin tissue structures are crucial for diagnosis of skin diseases. Recently, the Mueller matrix polarimetry and second harmonic generation microscopy have been widely used in skin tissue imaging due to their unique advantages. However, it is difficult to evaluate comprehensive structural characteristics of complex layered skin tissue by a single imaging modality. Therefore, we propose a dual-modality imaging method combining Mueller matrix polarimetry and second harmonic generation microscopy to achieve the automatic differentiation and quantitative evaluation of different layers of skin tissue. It is demonstrated that the dual-modality method can well divide the mouse tail skin tissue specimens’ images into three layers of stratum corneum, epidermis, and dermis. Then, the texture feature vector extracted by gray level co-occurrence matrix is used to quantitatively characterize the structure features of each layer. Finally, we propose an index named S-Health based on cosine similarity and the gray level co-occurrence matrix texture parameters to quantitatively measure the structural differences between damaged and normal skin areas. The experiments validate the efficacy of the dual-modality imaging method in discriminating and assessing skin tissue structures. It confirms the potential of the proposed method for dermatological practices