Stanciu Stefan G, Ávila Francisco J, Hristu Radu, Bueno Juan M
Center for Microscopy-Microanalysis and Information Processing, University Politehnica of Bucharest, Bucharest, Romania.
Laboratorio de Óptica, Universidad de Murcia, Murcia, Spain.
Sci Rep. 2017 Nov 13;7(1):15476. doi: 10.1038/s41598-017-15257-0.
Second harmonic generation (SHG) microscopy represents a very powerful tool for tissue characterization. Polarization-resolved SHG (PSHG) microscopy extends the potential of SHG, by exploiting the dependence of SHG signals on the polarization state of the excitation beam. Among others, this dependence translates to the fact that SHG images collected under different polarization configurations exhibit distinct characteristics in terms of content and appearance. These characteristics hold deep implications over image quality, as perceived by human observers or by image analysis methods custom designed to automatically extract a quality factor from digital images. Our work addresses this subject, by investigating how basic image properties and the outputs of no-reference image quality assessment methods correlate to human expert opinion in the case of PSHG micrographs. Our evaluation framework is based on SHG imaging of collagen-based ocular tissues under different linear and elliptical polarization states of the incident light.
二次谐波产生（SHG）显微镜是一种用于组织表征的非常强大的工具。偏振分辨SHG（PSHG）显微镜通过利用SHG信号对激发光束偏振态的依赖性，扩展了SHG的潜力。其中，这种依赖性表现为在不同偏振配置下采集的SHG图像在内容和外观方面呈现出不同的特征。这些特征对图像质量有着深远的影响，无论是人类观察者还是专门设计用于从数字图像中自动提取质量因子的图像分析方法所感知到的图像质量。我们的工作通过研究在PSHG显微照片的情况下，基本图像属性和无参考图像质量评估方法的输出如何与人类专家意见相关联，来解决这个问题。我们的评估框架基于在入射光的不同线性和椭圆偏振状态下对基于胶原蛋白的眼部组织进行SHG成像。
