In the last decade, consistent and successful innovations have been achieved in the field of lasers and optics, collectively known as ‘photonics’, founding new applications in biomedicine, including clinical biopsy. Non-invasive photonics-based diagnostic modalities are rapidly expanding, and with their exponential improvement, there is a great potential to develop practical instrumentation for automatic detection and identification of different types and/or sub-types of diseases at a very early stage. While using conventional light for the studies of different properties of objects in materials science, astrophysics and biomedicine already has a long history, the interaction of polarized light and optical angular momentum with turbid tissue-like scattering media has not yet been ultimately explored. Since recently this research area became a hot topic. This feature issue is a first attempt to summarize the recognitions achieved in this emerging research field of polarized light and optical angular momentum for practical biomedical applications during the last years.

中文翻译：

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生物医学应用中光的偏振和轨道角动量：特征问题介绍

在过去十年中，激光和光学领域取得了一致且成功的创新，统称为“光子学”，在包括临床活检在内的生物医学领域建立了新的应用。基于非侵入性光子学的诊断方式正在迅速扩展，并且随着它们的指数级改进，开发用于在早期阶段自动检测和识别不同类型和/或亚型疾病的实用仪器具有巨大潜力。虽然在材料科学、天体物理学和生物医学中使用传统光研究物体的不同性质已经有很长的历史，但偏振光和光学角动量与混浊组织状散射介质的相互作用尚未得到最终探索。最近这个研究领域成为一个热门话题。这个特征问题是第一次尝试总结过去几年在实际生物医学应用中偏振光和光学角动量这一新兴研究领域所取得的认识。