Modeling boundary measurements of scattered light using the corrected diffusion approximation

Biomed Opt Express. 2012 Mar 1;3(3):552-71. doi: 10.1364/BOE.3.000552. Epub 2012 Feb 21.

Abstract

We study the modeling and simulation of steady-state measurements of light scattered by a turbid medium taken at the boundary. In particular, we implement the recently introduced corrected diffusion approximation in two spatial dimensions to model these boundary measurements. This implementation uses expansions in plane wave solutions to compute boundary conditions and the additive boundary layer correction, and a finite element method to solve the diffusion equation. We show that this corrected diffusion approximation models boundary measurements substantially better than the standard diffusion approximation in comparison to numerical solutions of the radiative transport equation.

Keywords: (000.3860) Mathematical methods in physics; (030.5620) Radiative transfer; (170.3660) Light propagation in tissues; (170.7050) Turbid media; (290.1990) Diffusion.