Dual-angle Mueller Matrix Polarimetry For Single Cell

Label-free single-cell analysis plays a crucial role in the biomedical field. In this paper, we propose a dual-angle Mueller matrix polarization (DMMP) measurement system for the label-free classification and characterization of single cells. The DMMP can obtain the Mueller matrix of light scattering from individual particle at two scattering angles of 60° and 120°, and the experimental results exhibit excellent agreement with the simulation results based on Mie theory. Furthermore, experiments on various standard particles and cells, show that the DMMP combined with a back propagation neural network can accurately classify individual suspended particles of different types. Compared with non-polarization scattering detection or Stokes vector polarization measurement, our method exhibits a higher identification accuracy of 93.58% for measured six types of cells, confirming the validity and feasibility of our method. With the help of subsequent theoretical simulations, the characterization ability at different scattering angles can be explained, and then the parameters suitable for quantitatively estimating diameter and refractive index are also extracted. This study provides a new technical way for the high-throughput online labeling free single-cell precision analysis.