Boundary integral method for simulating laser short-pulse penetration into biological tissues

Abstract

The study of short-pulse propagation through biological tissues is important due to the medical applications of short-pulse lasers. Techniques used for numerical study of short pulses through human tissues include the Monte Carlo (MC) method, the finite-element method, and the finite-difference time-domain (FDTD), but these are often time consuming. Recently, the boundary integral method (BIM) was applied to overcome this problem. The literature shows that the BIM is faster than the other mentioned methods. We first investigate the precision of results obtained by the BIM by comparison with those results obtained by the MC and FDTD methods. Then we use the BIM to investigate the short-pulse penetration into biological tissues. We also study the effects of optical properties of tissues such as scattering, the absorption coefficient, the anisotropic factor on the penetrating pulse. We also, consider the propagation of pulses emitted from extended sources with different temporal evolutions.