Snapshot polarized light scattering spectroscopy using spectrally-modulated polarimetry for early gastric cancer detection.

Polarized light scattering spectroscopy (PLSS) is a promising optical technique developed for the detection of cancer, which extracts the single scattering light to infer morphological information of epithelial cells. However, traditional PLSS uses either a rotatable polarizer or two orthogonal polarizers to purify the single scattering light, which makes it complicated and challenged to build a PLSS endoscope. Herein, we propose a snapshot PLSS with a single optical path to directly get the single scattering light for the first time. The single scattering light is encoded using the spectrally-modulated polarimetry and decoded using the continuous slide iterative method. Both the polystyrene microsphere solutions and the ex vivo gastric cancer samples are used to verify the method. The experimental results of the snapshot PLSS are consistent well with that of the traditional PLSS. The proposed method has a potential for the building of snapshot PLSS endoscope systems in future.