Simulating Light Propagation through Biological Media Using Monte-Carlo Method

TL;DR

This paper presents a Monte Carlo simulation framework for modeling light propagation in complex biological tissues, incorporating parallel processing and realistic object shapes to improve accuracy and efficiency.

Contribution

It introduces a parallelized Monte Carlo method with nonparametric phase functions and shape-specific boundary modeling for biological tissue light transport.

Findings

Reduced simulation time through parallel processing

Enhanced realism with shape and refractive index modeling

Generation of detailed reflection, transmission, and absorption matrices

Abstract

Biological tissues are complex structures composed of many elements which make light-based tissue diagnostics challenging. Over the past decades, Monte Carlo technique has been used as a fundamental and versatile approach toward modeling photon-tissue interactions. This report first describes a MC simulation of steady-state light transport in an absorbing and diffusing multi-layered structure. Further, a parallel processing solution is implemented to reduce execution time and memory requirements. Then, the nonparametric phase function, which is a discretized version of the phase function, has been discussed where the integration of the phase function is a numerical process, instead of an analytical operation. Finally, to simulate more realistic structures of biological systems, simulations are modified to incorporate objects of various shapes (sphere, ellipsoid, or cylinder) with a refractive-index mismatched boundary. The output files mainly contain 2D reflection matrix, 2D transmission matrix, and 3D absorption matrix.