Study on retardance due to well-ordered birefringent cylinders in anisotropic scattering media.

We report an anisotropic tissue model containing well-ordered birefringent cylinders. Using simulations and experiments, we examined the different polarization features for nonbirefringent and birefringent cylinders and analyzed the influence of the birefringent cylinders on the retardance obtained from Mueller matrix polar decomposition. For the well-ordered birefringent cylinders, retardance increases linearly with the intrinsic birefringence and the scattering coefficient. Furthermore, the cylinders with a larger diameter generate more retardance. Compared with the cylinder-birefringence model, in which birefringent medium exists between the scatterers, the intrinsic birefringence on the cylinders usually contributes much less to the total retardance.