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Updated: Sep 26, 2025

Multimodal 3D Printing of Phantoms to Simulate Biological Tissue
Published on: January 11, 2020
MCDataset: a public reference dataset of Monte Carlo simulated quantities for multilayered and voxelated tissues
Miran Bürmen1, Franjo Pernuš1,2, Peter Naglič1
1University of Ljubljana, Faculty of Electrical Engineering, Ljubljana, Slovenia.
Significance:
Current open-source Monte Carlo (MC) method implementations for light propagation modeling are many times tedious to build and require third-party licensed software that can often discourage prospective researchers in the biomedical optics community from fully utilizing the light propagation tools. Furthermore, the same drawback also limits rigorous cross-validation of physical quantities estimated by various MC codes.
Aim:
Proposal of an open-source tool for light propagation modeling and an easily accessible dataset to encourage fruitful communications amongst researchers and pave the way to a more consistent comparison between the available implementations of the MC method.
Approach:
The PyXOpto implementation of the MC method for multilayered and voxelated tissues based on the Python programming language and PyOpenCL extension enables massively parallel computation on numerous OpenCL-enabled devices. The proposed implementation is used to compute a large dataset of reflectance, transmittance, energy deposition, and sampling volume for various source, detector, and tissue configurations.
Results:
The proposed PyXOpto agrees well with the original MC implementation. However, further validation reveals a noticeable bias introduced by the random number generator used in the original MC implementation.
Conclusions:
Establishing a common dataset is highly important for the validation of existing and development of MC codes for light propagation in turbid media.
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