RP-CARS takes advantage of polarization-dependent selection rules in order to gain information about molecule orientation anisotropy and direction within the optical point spread function.
RP-CARS takes advantage of the polarization-dependent selection rules to detect the local microscopic orientation of the chemical bonds under investigation.
This allows measuring for each pixel the average-orientation plane of the molecular bonds of interest and the degree of this spatial anisotropy in the point-spread-function volume.
Myelin is a highly ordered structure, in which many lipid- enriched, densely compacted phospholipid bilayers are spirally rolled up around the cylindrical axons.
Such a strong molecular anisotropy and azimuthal symmetry make RP-CARS a suitable tool to investigate neural white matter.