Steven L. Jacques, Ph.D., Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering Oregon Graduate Institute, Portland, Oregon, USA. email: jacquess@ohsu.edu, https://omlc.org

The basic idea.

Human skin presents a multilayered tissue, an epidermis and underlying dermis, which presents a regular texture to the doctor. As cancer grows into the dermis, the birefringent collagen of the dermis is replaced with a less birefringent cellular mass. Our goal is to visualize this perturbation.

The doctor's view of surface shows cancer as a subtle perturbation. Imaging with polarized light enhances this optical perturbation.