Simultaneous blood vessel and Mueller-matrix imaging of zebrafish embryos

Zebrafish has become a popular and highly effective animal model for human disease studies and biomedical discovery. Though multiple techniques have been developed for testing its resistance to environmental, toxicological and other stressors. For in vivo studies of the side effects of toxicants on particular organs, non-invasive imaging techniques are necessary. For example, optical tracking the variations of transmitted light intensity allows accurate blood vessel mapping of the whole animal while monitoring the polarization state of light allows muscles imaging. In this study, we propose to combine these two techniques into one using a Polarsens sensor with 4-directional on-chip polarizer. It provides singleshot acquisition of 4 multi-directional polarized images and calculating both temporal and polarization properties of light interacted with the specimen. Multiple experiments on zebrafish embryos demonstrate high efficiency of this approach for simultaneous hemodynamics and muscular structure analysis. We believe it might be highly effective for in vivo quantifying pathological reactions to various stressors in cardiovascular and skeletal muscle systems.