This book provides an essential overview of the basic principles of imaging modalities, accompanied by examples of their applications in modern clinical and associated pre-clinical studies. The monograph is based on the original results of investigation of the efficiency use of laser light and Mueller-matrix polarimetry approach for assessment of myocardial tissues towards confirmation the cause of death. A morphological analysis of necrotic changes in the myocardial tissue of patients that died due to heart attack, coronary heart disease and acute coronary insufficiency was carried out and the data and histological sections of the myocardium inspected utilizing Mueller-matrix mapping of tissue samples with polarized light. A unified optical model of polycrystalline structure of the myocardium is proposed, and the principles and regulations of Mueller-matrix description of its polarization manifestations are explored and developed. The book also provides a statistical and scale-selective wavelet analysis of polarization and Mueller-matrix maps. Finally, the key forensic medical criteria for the differential diagnosis of the cause of death due to necrotic and pathological changes in the morphological structure of the myocardium have been established

This book highlights the analysis of new azimuth-independent methods of Stokes polarimetry and Mueller-matrix reconstruction of distributions of optical anisotropy parameters using spatial-frequency filtering of manifestations of phase (linear and circular birefringence) and amplitude (linear and circular dichroism) anisotropy for diagnosing changes in the orientational-phase structure of fibrillar networks of histological sections of biological tissues and polycrystalline films of biological fluids.