Scaling method for fast Monte Carlo simulation of diffuse reflectance spectra from multilayered turbid media

A scaling Monte Carlo method has been developed to calculate diffuse reflectance from multilayered media with a wide range of optical properties in the ultraviolet-visible wavelength range. This multilayered scaling method employs the photon trajectory information generated from a single baseline Monte Carlo simulation of a homogeneous medium to scale the exit distance and exit weight of photons for a new set of optical properties in the multilayered medium. The scaling method is particularly suited to simulating diffuse reflectance spectra or creating a Monte Carlo database to extract optical properties of layered media, both of which are demonstrated in this paper. Particularly, it was found that the root-mean-square error (RMSE) between scaled diffuse reflectance, for which the anisotropy factor and refractive index in the baseline simulation were, respectively, 0.9 and 1.338, and independently simulated diffuse reflectance was less than or equal to 5% for source-detector separations from 200 to 1500 microm when the anisotropy factor of the top layer in a two-layered epithelial tissue model was varied from 0.8 to 0.99; in contrast, the RMSE was always less than 5% for all separations (from 0 to 1500 microm) when the anisotropy factor of the bottom layer was varied from 0.7 to 0.99. When the refractive index of either layer in the two-layered tissue model was varied from 1.3 to 1.4, the RMSE was less than 10%. The scaling method can reduce computation time by more than 2 orders of magnitude compared with independent Monte Carlo simulations.