## 3 Results and Discussion  
Scans were performed on chicken breast, pork, and beef samples to demonstrate the improvement in imaging depth and resolution achieved by the system. The experiments used a collimated beam diameter of 2.04 mm, with a power of 10-15 mW applied to the samples. Every cross-sectional image contained 1000 A-lines, as shown in Figure 5. A significant advantage of PSOCT, in addition to the basic structural information provided by  
Figure 4: (**a**) Numerical correction procedure for an imperfect circularly polarized reference; (**b**) image of the polarization composition of the beam obtained by the sample arm before reaching the sample. reflectivity imaging, is its ability to capture phase retardation imaging, including birefringence information. However, the original OCT reflectivity image shows only the structural details of the sample, and the imaging quality is less clear. Based on phase retardation, the birefringence image additionally demonstrates the birefringent characteristics, enabling the observation of distinct muscle fiber structures within the sample with evident layering. Figure 5a shows the imaging effect of thin layer slices of isolated chicken breast. (a1) Reflectance imaging can visualize the surface of the sample and the internal structure of muscle fiber. However, the imaging results are fuzzy, and the stratification structure is not clear. Because chicken breasts are mainly composed of fibrous tissue and have strong birefringent properties, the birefringence image of (a3) appears in multiple layers. These axial color lacerations are phase delay maps obtained through data processing, which reflect only the birefringence characteristics of the sample itself and do not represent the actual structural alterations inside the sample. When examining a tissue sample of muscle pork ex vivo, various parts of the sample tissue exhibit distinguishable levels of birefringence. The pork samples were scanned across the fat and lean areas. In Figure 5(b3), the birefringence imaging can be divided into approximately quadruples from left to right. One-quarter and three-quarters of the color are relatively consistent, corresponding to the white part of the pork sample; approximately three panchromatic oscillations occur in the two rightmost quarters, which indicate a phase shift of 360\({}^{\circ}\), corresponding to the red portion of the sample. The variation in refractive indices among various tissue samples was validated by this observation. Simultaneously, a comparison between the Figure 5 (3) and (4) images reveals the noticeable effects of the correction method. This comparison highlights the significant effects of the correction technique. Building on this, Figure 5 (3) and (4) was generated using a calibration algorithm applied to the 4096 \(\times\) 1000 data used for imaging. The depth profiles of the intensity signals of a single reflector in the birefringence image before and after calibration were measured to quantitatively analyze the extent of improvement in the images due to the numerical calibration algorithm for circularly polarized light. Each image in Figure 5 contains 1000 such A-lines. The image is mainly  
Figure 5: PSOCT images recorded in vitro. The rows from top to bottom show the chicken breast (**a**), pork (**b**), and beef (**c**) in vitro sample imaging. (**1,2**) (the first two columns) are reflectance imaging. (**3,4**) (the last two columns) are birefringence imaging. (**1,3**) show the imaging before calibration, and (**2,4**) show the imaging after calibration. presented around depth positions of 100-300. After a depth position of 450, it is beyond the imaging range of the system, and the intensity here is the noise intensity. As illustrated in Figure 6, the orange curve depicts the signal intensity before calibration, whereas the blue curve shows the signal intensity after calibration. The orange curve shows a slope from 0 to 100 depths, which may be caused by the light not passing through the center of the QWP during scanning.