Over the last decade, there is upsurge of cervical cancer. Most of the cervical cancer cases (>90%) are the result of infection with high-risk human papillomaviruses (HPV). Two approaches for reducing the mortality rate are, Primary: HPV vaccination Secondary: testing and screening at early stages. There are different non-invasive or minimally invasive fluorescence as well as polarization based optical methods for early-stage screening of cervical cancer. The inherent fluorophores present in tissue imprint their characteristic signatures, reflecting corresponding changes in the average dipolar orientations when the light interacts with the tissue. Through the analysis of the interaction between polarized light and tissue, a comprehensive understanding of the complex structural and biochemical characteristics of the cervix can be obtained. The Fluorescence Mueller matrix (FMM) is ideally suited to extract the anisotropic information of excited and emitted states of fluorophores through the parameters, known as diattenuation and polarizance.
|