A dynamic accuracy estimation for GPU-based monte carlo simulation in tissue optics

Tissue optics is a well-established and extensively studied area. In the last decades, Monte Carlo simulation (MCS) has been one of the standard tools for simulation of light propagation in turbid media. The utilization of parallel processing exhibits dramatic increase in the speed of MCS’s of photon migration. Some calculations based on MCS can be completed within a few seconds. Since the MCS’s have the potential to become a real time calculation method, a dynamic accuracy estimation, which is also known as history by history statistical estimators, is required in the simulation code to automatically terminate the MCS as the results’ accuracy achieves a high enough level. In this work, spatial and time-domain GPU-based MCS, adopting the dynamic accuracy estimation, are performed to calculate the light dose/reflectance in homogeneous and heterogeneous tissue media. This dynamic accuracy estimation can effectively derive the statistical error of optical dose/reflectance during the parallel Monte Carlo process. © 2017 Current Optics and Photonics.