Abstract
We present a polarization-sensitive, transport-rigorous perturbation Monte Carlo (pMC) method to model the impact of optical property changes on reflectance measurements within a discrete particle scattering model. The model consists of three log-normally distributed populations of Mie scatterers that approximate biologically relevant cervical tissue properties. Our method provides reflectance estimates for perturbations across wavelength and/or scattering model parameters. We test our pMC model performance by perturbing across number densities and mean particle radii, and compare pMC reflectance estimates with those obtained from conventional Monte Carlo simulations. These tests allow us to explore different factors that control pMC performance and to evaluate the gains in computational efficiency that our pMC method provides.
Highlights
The study of in vivo and in vitro cell and tissue microstructure, which yields information about underlying cellular processes and responses, has been historically addressed by optical biopsy techniques
We investigate the ability of our perturbation Monte Carlo (pMC) method to predict changes in reflectance produced by perturbations in the mean radii and/or number density of one of the three particle populations
Because number density perturbations do not result in perturbation of the phase function and because of the smaller changes in μs, these pMC reflectance estimates have smaller variance than when perturbing mean radii
Summary
The study of in vivo and in vitro cell and tissue microstructure, which yields information about underlying cellular processes and responses, has been historically addressed by optical biopsy techniques. There appears to be growing interest in the use of polarization-sensitive optical probes as a tool to non-invasively obtain information regarding subcellular microstructure. Mourant and co-workers have integrated polarized wavelength-dependent measurement capabilities into reflectance based optical probes to increase sensitivity to scatterer size [1]. Sokolov and co-workers have used a probe with angled illumination collection geometry that detects light polarization to obtain depthspecific information of scatterer size and size distribution [3]. These methods, all represent instrumentation-based approaches to extract information about the underlying subcellular structure. Our exploration in this study serves as a demonstration of one of many applications that can benefit from the use of pMC and as a mechanism for discovering the factors that affect pMC performance for a class of similar problems
Sign-in/Register to view highlights & summary Sign-in/Register to access full text options 
Free) 
Talk to us
Join us for a 30 min session where you can share your feedback and ask us any queries you have
Schedule a call
