Using graphics processing units to accelerate perturbation Monte Carlo simulation in a turbid medium

Abstract

We report a fast perturbation Monte Carlo (PMC) algorithm accelerated by graphics processing units (GPU). The two-step PMC simulation [Opt. Lett. 36, 2095 (2011)] is performed by storing the seeds instead of the photon's trajectory, and thus the requirement in computer random-access memory (RAM) becomes minimal. The two-step PMC is extremely suitable for implementation onto GPU. In a standard simulation of spatially-resolved photon migration in the turbid media, the acceleration ratio between using GPU and using conventional CPU is about 1000. Furthermore, since in the two-step PMC algorithm one records the effective seeds, which is associated to the photon that reaches a region of interest in this letter, and then re-run the MC simulation based on the recorded effective seeds, radiative transfer equation (RTE) can be solved by two-step PMC not only with an arbitrary change in the absorption coefficient, but also with large change in the scattering coefficient.