The application of polarization microscopy to the development of a non-staining technique for measuring the divergence angle of myocardial collagen cleavage planes

Myocardial infarction and congestive heart failure posse a serious health threat to the population. The current methods of studying the biomechanics responsible for the underlying remodeling processes that lead to these conditions, utilize stained tissue histological techniques. These techniques possess some undesirable effects, therefore, other alternatives are being investigated. For this paper, we investigate an alternative by utilizing polarization imaging to image non-stained rat myocardium for the purpose of quantifying the collagen sheet angles, beta, of cardiac cleavage planes from the epicardial wall.