Accelerating Monte Carlo modeling of structured-light based diffuse optical imaging via “photon sharing”

Abstract

<jats:p>The increasing use of spatially-modulated imaging and single-pixel detection techniques demands computationally efficient methods for light transport modeling. Herein, we report an easy-to-implement yet significantly more efficient Monte Carlo (MC) method for simultaneously simulating spatially modulated illumination and detection patterns accurately in 3-D complex domains. We have implemented this accelerated algorithm, named “photon sharing”, in our open-source MC simulators, reporting 13.6× and 5.5× speedups in mesh- and voxel-based MC benchmarks, respectively. In addition, the proposed algorithm is readily used for accelerating the solving of inverse problems in spatially-modulated imaging systems by building Jaco-bians of all illumination-detection pattern pairs concurrently, resulting in a 12.4-fold speed improvement.</jats:p><jats:p><jats:ext-link xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink" ext-link-type="uri" xlink:href="https://doi.org/10.1101/2020.02.16.951590">https://doi.org/10.1101/2020.02.16.951590</jats:ext-link></jats:p>

Challenges and advances in optical 3D mesoscale imaging

“…In this strong scattering imaging regime, a major concern is lateral interpixel crosstalk, which degrades the resolution. Consequently, major efforts have been put into the assessment of photon transport in these tissues to improve reconstructions 68–72 . Likewise, Monte Carlo simulations are used in PET along with digital phantoms to evaluate reconstruction/quantification protocols, 73 and generally, different approaches have been made to model scattering in tissue 74 .…”

“…Consequently, major efforts have been put into the assessment of photon transport in these tissues to improve reconstructions. [68][69][70][71][72] Likewise, Monte Carlo simulations are used in PET along with digital phantoms to evaluate reconstruction/quantification protocols, 73 and generally, different approaches have been made to model scattering in tissue. 74 It is of note that beyond the optical imaging regime, scattering can be further distinguished as elastic scattering, where there is no change in the energy, or inelastic, where energy is lost (and the intensity is attenuated) in the process of scattering, as in Compton scattering.…”

Early‐photon reflectance fluorescence molecular tomography for small animal imaging: Mathematical model and numerical experiment

“…The character of mesoscopic FMT is that the diffusion approximation to the radiative transfer equation, which is the preferable forward model in DOT and macroscopic FMT, cannot be employed here due to limited volume interrogation and anisotropic light propagation. In this situation it is necessary to use the much more demanding Monte Carlo method 8,55 and then solve how to speedup calculations 56 …”

“…In this situation it is necessary to use the much more demanding Monte Carlo method 8,55 and then solve how to speedup calculations. 56 Hybrid imaging methods that allow synthesizing multimodal images and combine rich optical contrast of FMT with high-resolution structural information of MRI, CT, and UST have successfully been developed in recent years. There is no doubt that this direction will go on developing.…”

Light transport modeling in highly complex tissues using implicit mesh-based Monte Carlo algorithm

“…New efforts have also led to the generalization of MMC to support wide-field illumination and camera-based detection [22,23], as well as a dual-grid MMC (DMMC) approach combining a coarsely tessellated mesh for ray-tracing with a fine voxelated domain for storage [17]. Other new MMC-based approaches have been proposed to address challenges in ease-of-use [24], modeling anisotropic tissues [21], studying new imaging techniques [25], and solving inverse problems [26,27].…”