Coherent Wave Monte Carlo method for simulating light propagation in tissue

摘要

Simulating propagation and scattering of coherent light in turbid media, such as biological tissues, is a complex problem. Numerical methods for solving Helmholtz or wave equation (e.g. finite-difference or finite-element methods) require large amount of computer memory and long computation time. This makes them impractical for simulating laser beam propagation into deep layers of tissue. Other group of methods, based on radiative-transfer equation, allows to simulate only propagation of light averaged over the ensemble of turbid medium realizations. This makes them unuseful for simulating phenomena connected to coherence properties of light. We propose a new method for simulating propagation of coherent light (e.g. laser beam) in biological tissue, that we called Coherent-Wave Monte Carlo method. This method is based on direct computation of optical interaction between scatterers inside the random medium, what allows to reduce amount of memory and computation time required for simulation. We present the theoretical basis of the proposed method and its comparison with finite-difference methods for simulating light propagation in scattering media in Rayleigh approximation regime.