A mouse optical simulation environment (MOSE) to investigate bioluminescent phenomena in the living mouse with the Monte Carlo method.
OBJECTIVE
As an important part of bioluminescence tomography, which is a newly developed optical imaging modality, mouse optical simulation environment (MOSE) is developed to simulate bioluminescent phenomena in the living mouse and to predict bioluminescent signals detectable outside the mouse. This simulator is dedicated to small animal optical imaging based on bioluminescence.


METHODS
With the parameters of biological tissues, bioluminescent sources, and charge coupled device (CCD) detectors, the 2-dimensional/3-dimensional MOSE simulates the whole process of the light propagation in 2-dimensional/3-dimensional biological tissues using the Monte Carlo method. Both the implementation details and the software architecture are described in this article.


RESULTS
The software system is implemented in the Visual C++ programming language with the OpenGL techniques and has a user-friendly interface facilitating interactions relevant to bioluminescent imaging. The accuracy of the system is verified by comparing the MOSE results with independent data from analytic solutions and commercial software.


CONCLUSIONS
As shown in our simulation and analysis, the MOSE is accurate, flexible, and efficient to simulate the photon propagation for bioluminescence tomography. With graduate refinements and enhancements, it is hoped that the MOSE will become a standard tool for bioluminescence tomography.
Li
Hui
H
Medical Image Processing Group, Key Laboratory of Complex Systems and Intelligence Science, Institute of Automation, Chinese Academy of Science, Beijing, China.
Tian
Jie
J
Zhu
Fuping
F
Cong
Wenxiang
W
Wang
Lihong V
LV
Hoffman
Eric A
EA
Wang
Ge
G
D003198:Computer Simulation; D006801:Humans; D007091:Image Processing, Computer-Assisted; D008163:Luminescent Measurements; D009010:Monte Carlo Method; D019047:Phantoms, Imaging; D012984:Software; D041622:Tomography, Optical