Simulating Light Propagation through Biological Media Using Monte-Carlo Method

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.