Effect of nonsphericity of scattering centers on light transport in turbid media

Abstract

The scattering centers in cells are not spheres, however, in most modeling of light transport, the scattering centers are assumed to be spherical. For example, in Monte Carlo simulations a Mie or Henyey-Greenstein phase function is often used. It is known that an elliptical particle will have a different phase function than a spherical particle. In particular there are differences in the phase functions for scattering polarized light. To examine how these changes in phase function affect light transport in tissue, we have developed a Monte Carlo code for light transport that uses elliptical scatterers. The phase functions are calculated using a T-matrix code and the propagation of polarized photons is performed in a manner analagous to that used by Bartel and Hielscher. Our initial results indicate that for narrow particle distributions the difference in shape can cause large differences in the intensity and polarization properties of the diffusely reflected light. For a mixture of particle sizes, however, there is a much smaller difference in the properties of the diffusely scattered light. Results are presented for both narrow and broad distributions of scatter sizes relevant to tissue.