title: Three-dimensional Neumann-series approach to model light transport in nonuniform media.
abstract: We present the implementation, validation, and performance of a three-dimensional (3D) Neumann-series approach to model photon propagation in nonuniform media using the radiative transport equation (RTE). The RTE is implemented for nonuniform scattering media in a spherical harmonic basis for a diffuse-optical-imaging setup. The method is parallelizable and implemented on a computing system consisting of NVIDIA Tesla C2050 graphics processing units (GPUs). The GPU implementation provides a speedup of up to two orders of magnitude over non-GPU implementation, which leads to good computational efficiency for the Neumann-series method. The results using the method are compared with the results obtained using the Monte Carlo simulations for various small-geometry phantoms, and good agreement is observed. We observe that the Neumann-series approach gives accurate results in many cases where the diffusion approximation is not accurate.
authors.affiliation: College of Optical Sciences, University of Arizona, Tucson, Arizona 85721, USA. akjha@email.arizona.edu
authors.forename: Abhinav K
authors.initials: AK
authors.lastname: Jha
authors.forename: Matthew A
authors.initials: MA
authors.lastname: Kupinski
authors.forename: Harrison H
authors.initials: HH
authors.lastname: Barrett
authors.forename: Eric
authors.initials: E
authors.lastname: Clarkson
authors.forename: John H
authors.initials: JH
authors.lastname: Hartman
mesh_terms: D003196:Computer Graphics; D004058:Diffusion; D008027:Light; D008962:Models, Theoretical; D009010:Monte Carlo Method; D055620:Optical Phenomena; D017785:Photons