Wave optical simulation of optical imaging using experimentally acquired sample refractive index maps

Simulation of light propagation in biological tissue is gaining importance in understanding how biological tissues scatter light and in interpreting optical images of such tissues. The development of light scattering simulation techniques, which include finite element, finite difference and volume integral methods, has remained advanced relative to the acquisition of three-dimensional refractive index distributions of biological tissues. Such refractive index distributions are required for light propagation simulations to obtain new insight into scientific and medical applications. Until the recent development of robust implementations of optical diffraction tomography, there has been a relative scarcity of such data. In this talk we demonstrate how advanced optical modelling, in combination with advanced refractive index models of mouse retina, can be used to simulate optical coherence tomography image formation of mouse retina. We will investigate whether such data, which still has resolution limited by the optical diffraction limit, contains sufficient information to generate realistic optical coherence tomography images.