Wide-field high-resolution Mueller matrix imaging via Fourier ptychography

Mueller matrix (MM) imaging enables label-free, non-invasive characterization of the microstructure and intrinsic optical properties of biological tissues and has emerged as a vital research direction in bio-optical imaging owing to its growing application potential in biomedical pathological diagnosis and cellular analysis. Nevertheless, conventional full-slide MM imaging techniques are constrained by the inherent trade-off between spatial resolution and effective field of view (FOV), which severely limits their practical application in high-throughput, high-resolution characterization of large-scale biological specimens. To overcome this technical bottleneck, this study proposes a Fourier Ptychographic Mueller Matrix Imaging (FPMMI) system. Built upon a novel computational microscopy framework, the system integrates high-precision polarization measurement via dual rotating retarders with the Fourier ptychographic reconstruction algorithm. It achieves high-quality MM imaging with a spatial resolution of 1.53 μm across a large FOV of 5.18 mm2, delivering megapixel-scale spatial-bandwidth product. The experiment based on a standard resolution target verifies the technical performance of the developed system, and further tests on typical biological samples confirm that the FPMMI system satisfies the practical demand for label-free, high-resolution imaging of large-scale tissue samples in biomedicine, offering a novel label-free, polarization-based technical approach for high-resolution pathological diagnosis.