Mesh-based Monte Carlo method using fast ray-tracing in Plücker coordinates

By Qianqian Fang. Biomedical Optics Express, 2010

381 citations recorded by the source corpus.

We describe a fast mesh-based Monte Carlo (MC) photon migration algorithm for static and time-resolved imaging in 3D complex media. Compared with previous works using voxel-based media discretization, a mesh-based approach can be more accurate in modeling targets with curved boundaries or locally refined structures. We implement an efficient ray-tracing technique using Plücker Coordinates. The Barycentric coordinates computed from Plücker-formed ray-tracing enables us to use linear Lagrange basis functions to model both media properties and fluence distribution, leading to further improvement in accuracy. The Plücker-coordinate ray-polygon intersection test can be extended to hexahedral or high-order elements. Excellent agreement is found when comparing mesh-based MC with the analytical diffusion model and 3D voxel-based MC code in both homogeneous and heterogeneous cases. Realistic time-resolved imaging results are observed for a complex human brain anatomy using mesh-based MC. We also include multi-threading support in the software and will port it to a graphics processing unit platform in the near future.

Subfields: Radiology, Nuclear Medicine and Imaging

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/287abf8fbd7365c8b02fdc6c2e0ec63534907537

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In Radiology, Nuclear Medicine and Imaging

Citations in the corpus

Time domain functional NIRS imaging for human brain mapping (2014, positive): “Recently, a further improvement in terms of speed, memory usage, and accuracy has been obtained by implementing a 3D code that represents a complex domain using a volumetric mesh (Fang, 2010; Fang and Kaeli, 2012).”
The NIRS Brain AnalyzIR Toolbox (2018, methodology): “Parts of the toolbox interface to fNIRS forward models (models of the light propagation through tissue/brain) require separate download of the software such as NIRFAST (Near-Infrared light transport in tissue and image reconstruction) [21,22], Matlab/Octave-based mesh generation toolbox (Iso2mesh) [”
Anatomical guidance for functional near-infrared spectroscopy: AtlasViewer tutorial (2015, background): “program Monte Carlo extreme, which uses the graphical processor unit to speed up the simulation by more than 100×.(26) The user can specify the optical properties (reduced scattering coefficient μ 0 s, and absorption coefficient μa) of the different tissue types in the head model.”