Visualization of White Matter Fiber Tracts of Brain Tissue Sections With Wide-Field Imaging Mueller Polarimetry.

Identification of white matter fiber tracts of the brain is crucial for delineating the tumor border during neurosurgery. A custom-built Mueller polarimeter was used in reflection configuration for the wide-field imaging of thick sections of fixed human brain and fresh calf brain. The maps of the azimuth of the fast optical axis of linear birefringent medium reconstructed from the experimental Mueller matrix images of the specimen by applying a non-linear data compression algorithm showed a strong correlation with the silver-stained sample histology image, which is the gold standard for ex-vivo brain fiber tract visualization.