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Mesh-based Monte Carlo (MMC)

Monte Carlo photon migration for complex shapes using tetrahedral meshes

  • Mesh-based Monte Carlo, or MMC, is a Monte Carlo (MC) simulation software for photon migration in 3D turbid media. Different from the existing MC software designed for layered (such as MCML) or voxel-based media (such as MCX or tMCimg), MMC can represent a complex domain using a tetrahedral mesh. This not only greatly improves the accuracy of the solutions when modeling objects with smooth/complex boundaries, but also gives an efficient way to sample the problem domain to use less memory. The current version of MMC support multi-threaded programming and can give a almost proportional speed-up when using multiple CPU cores.

Title

Mesh-based Monte Carlo Method Using Fast Ray-Tracing in Plücker Coordinates

Abstract

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.

Preview

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