A coupling model of light propagation based on the radiative transfer and diffusion equations

Abstract

Recently, transport phenomena of photon energy have been attractive topics due to the applications of the biomedical imaging such as diffuse optical tomography (DOT). For improvement of numerical modeling in DOT, accurate and fast calculations of light propagations in biological tissues are necessary. This paper proposes a light propagation model based on the radiative transfer and diffusion equations (RTE and DE) in random media. Numerical calculations of light propagation using the both equations provide the condition for the DE to be valid. Length and time scales for the validity of the DE are estimated to be about 10lm and 20lm/ν, respectively, where lm is the mean free path of photon and v is the light velocity. The proposed model can provide accurate descriptions of spatial and temporal profiles of light propagation in random media subject to the refractive-index mismatched boundary condition. Also, it can appropriately reduce computation time by an order of magnitude when compared with that fully computing the RTE.