Abstract
Polarization-sensitive OCT (PS-OCT) has proven useful in determining the stress-induced birefringence of non-biological materials, but such utility in biological tissues subjected to stress has not been well studied yet. To study stress-induced birefringence of biological tissues, we use a swept-source PS-OCT system with passively depth-encoded, orthogonal polarization states in the illumination path and polarization-diversity detection and a Mueller formalism in post-processing. We present measurements of stress-induced changes in the birefringence of non-biological and biological samples that provide useful benchmarks in further assessing the utility of this approach.