Polarimetric scattering signature imaging of highly photon-scattering bio-medium Stewart H. Wu 1 , Po-Hsiung Chen 1 , De-Ming Yang 2 , Hsing-Wen Wang 1 , Arthur Chiou 1 , Soe-Mie F. Nee 3 and Tsu-Wei Nee 1* 1 Institute of Biophotonics, National Yang Ming University, Taipei 11221, Taiwan 2 Taipei Veterans General Hospital, Taipei 11217, Taiwan 3 Neopola Optical Analysis, Richmond, CA 94804, U. S. A. * Corresponding author: tsuw.nee@gmail.com ABSTRACT The photon-scattering imaging data of Liposyn II intravenous emulsion solution samples of different concentrations and different thicknesses is reported and analyzed. The scattering Mueller matrix element m 11 data shows that the maximum number of multi-photon scatterings is an increasing function of concentration and sample thickness. Keywords: photon-scattering, non-diffusive scattering, Mueller matrix, polarimetric multi-signature imaging. 1. INTRODUCTION Tissue is an optically anisotropic and highly photon-scattering medium because of its complex structure [1]. In order to characterize a bio-medium optically, it is necessary to determine all the properties of light quantitatively. The scattering property has long been treated as an optically diffusive medium in bio-medical applications. The diffusion equation of isotropic photon-density wave (PDW) was widely applied to interpret the data of biomedical imaging experiments [2-6]. The optical polarization properties of an anisotropic object, material or device, can be completely described by a 4 x 4 Mueller matrix. It has been used for characterizing the material structures [7 - 11] and interpreting the polarimetric imaging data of bio-molecule and bio-medium [12, 13]. For polarimetric microscope application, a Mueller matrix theory of transmission experiment, based upon the anisotropic orientation distribution of ellipsoid model bio-molecules was developed [14]. The Mueller matrix of the sample in the principal axes is [7, 8] M = T m = ⎝ ⎜ ⎜ ⎛ ⎠ ⎟ ⎟ ⎞ 1 m 01 0 0 m 01 m 11 0 0 0 0 m 22 m 23 0 0 -m 23 m 33 . (1) Design and Quality for Biomedical Technologies IV, edited by Ramesh Raghavachari, Rongguang Liang, Proc. of SPIE Vol. 7891, 78910R · © 2011 SPIE · CCC code: 1605-7422/11/$18 · doi: 10.1117/12.873147 Proc. of SPIE Vol. 7891 78910R-1