Using Mueller’s formalism in differentiation of irradiate collagen from non-irradiate one based on polarimetric measurements

In this paper, we propose a method to apply the polarimetry in biology using our single channel polarimetric system. We study the effect of irradiation on a class of protein – the collagen of the skin. Firstly, we present Mueller’s formalism and the difficulties encountered in extracting information from Mueller’s matrix due to the fact that all optical properties are mixed in it. Our solution is to globally characterize media through the Poincaré formalism, an index of depolarization and an index of entropy. Secondly, we briefly present our experimental setup and use these indexes to differentiate irradiate collagen from non-irradiate one.