Fast vectorized Monte Carlo technique for simulating light propagation in scattering media

Abstract

We present a fast method for performing the Monte Carlo (MC) technique on the propagation of a focused Gaussian beam in a scattering medium. Our method vectorizes the scattering process and pre-computes the paths of the photons per scattering step. We compare the runtime of this method with that of conventional photonby-photon MC method and find that our method runs nearly an order of magnitude faster at high degree of scattering. However at low degree of scattering, the increase in efficiency is less significant. We also obtained the plot of the fractional photons detected versus the ratio of the sample thickness to the mean free path of the photons.