Characterizing microstructural changes of skeletal muscle tissues using spectral transformed Mueller matrix polarization parameters

Polarization imaging techniques are recognized as potentially powerful tools to detect the structural changes of biological tissues. Meanwhile, spectral features of the scattered light can also provide abundant microstructural information, therefore can be applied in biomedical studies. In this paper, we adopt the polarization reflectance spectral imaging to analyze the microstructural changes of hydrolyzing skeletal muscle tissues. We measure the Mueller matrix, which is a comprehensive description of the polarization properties, of the bovine skeletal muscle samples in different periods of time, and analyze its behavior using the multispectral Mueller matrix transformation (MMT) technique. The experimental results show that for bovine skeletal muscle tissues, the backscattered spectral MMT parameters have different values and variation features at different stages. We can also find the experimental results indicate that the stages of hydrolysis for bovine skeletal muscle samples can be judged by the spectral MMT parameters. The results presented in this work show that combining with the spectral technique, the MMT parameters have the potential to be used as tools for meat quality detection and monitoring.