Novel measurement of Mueller matrix for cells

In this work, we propose a method to measure the Mueller matrix of biological tissues rapidly. Firstly, the effect of biological tissues on the incident light can be represented as absorption, phase retardance and depolarization. This paper defines four parameters as absorption coefficient, phase retardance coefficient, depolarization proportion and azimuth of incident light, respectively. Secondly, we decompose the incident light into two parts: one is totally depolarized, the other is absorbed and its phase is retarded. The two processes are characterized by two corresponding Mueller submatrixes. Then two Mueller submatrixes are derived based on the relation between the Stokes vectors of incident light and output light. Moreover, on the basis of a linear combination of the two Mueller submatrixes, we obtain the Mueller matrix of biological tissues, which contains the unknown parameters. Lastly, we employ the pellicle cell of magnolia for the sample and acquisition of it's polarization images. Then this paper applies the method to construct calculation model from the image data. And just 6 intensity measurements are needed to calculate the four parameters.