Flexible Positioning of Source-Detector Arrays in 3D Visualization Platform for Monte Carlo Simulation of Light Propagation

In current Monte Carlo (MC) simulations of the light propagation in biological tissues, the sources (S) or detectors (D) are mainly positioned in view of 2-D planes, leading to the rough accuracy, and low efficiency. This paper proposed a 3-D visualization platform with interactive view to determine the S-D coordinates as well as the incident direction of source light. Moreover, the proposed system permits implementation of the MC simulation in a flexible voxel spacing, beyond the original voxel of medical images. Validation studies on a realistic 3-D human head model show that the S-D pairs can be fast and accurately positioned on the tissue surface with assistance of the visualization platform, indicating its great potential for biomedical optical applications.