Imaging Scattering Characteristics of Tissue in Transmitted Microscopy

Mihoko Shimano, Yuta Asano, Shin Ishihara, Ryoma Bise, Imari Sato

Abstract: Scattering property plays a very important role in optical imaging and diagnostic applications, such as analysis of cancerous process and diagnosis of dysplasia or cancer. The existing methods focused on removing scattering components in order to visualize the spatial distribution of the reflection and absorption properties. We propose a novel method for estimating the spatial distribution of scattering property by measuring a set of intensities of the direct scattered light with each angle for each point. Our key contribution is to decompose the captured light into the direct scattered light with each angle by using varying spatial frequency of illumination patterns that can control the range of the scattered angle. By applying the method to observe a spatially inhomogeneous translucent object, we can extract the map of the angular distribution of scattering. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first method to enable visualizing a spatial map of scattering property using a conventional transmitted microscope setup. Experimental results on synthetic data and real complex materials demonstrate the effectiveness of our method for the estimation of scattering distribution.