Reconstruction of optical vector-fields with applications in endoscopic imaging

TL;DR

This paper presents a novel method for reconstructing optical vector-fields, including amplitude, phase, and polarization, from calibration measurements, enabling enhanced tissue imaging and early cancer detection.

Contribution

It introduces a flexible reconstruction framework that works with arbitrary basis systems, notably Fourier basis, for improved endoscopic tissue analysis.

Findings

Successfully reconstructs optical vector-fields from endoscopic measurements.

Fourier coefficients help distinguish healthy tissue from early-stage cancer.

Method demonstrates effectiveness with synthetic and biological samples.

Abstract

We introduce a framework for the reconstruction of the amplitude, phase and polarisation of an optical vector-field using calibration measurements acquired by an imaging device with an unknown linear transformation. By incorporating effective regularisation terms, this new approach is able to recover an optical vector-field with respect to an arbitrary representation system, which may be different from the one used in calibration. In particular, it enables the recovery of an optical vector-field with respect to a Fourier basis, which is shown to yield indicative features of increased scattering associated with tissue abnormalities. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach using synthetic holographic images as well as biological tissue samples in an experimental setting where measurements of an optical vector-field are acquired by a fibre endoscope, and observe that indeed the recovered Fourier coefficients are useful in distinguishing healthy tissues from lesions in early stages of oesophageal cancer.