Designing and simulating realistic spatial frequency domain imaging systems using open-source 3D rendering software

Spatial frequency domain imaging (SFDI) is a low-cost imaging technique that maps absorption and reduced scattering coefficients, offering improved contrast for important tissue structures such as tumours. Practical SFDI systems must cope with various imaging geometries including imaging planar samples ex vivo, imaging inside tubular lumen in vivo e.g. for endoscopy, and measuring tumours or polyps of varying morphology. There is a need for a design and simulation tool to accelerate design of new SFDI systems and simulate realistic performance under these scenarios. We present such a system implemented using open-source 3D design and ray-tracing software Blender that simulates media with realistic absorption and scattering in a wide range of geometries. By using Blender's Cycles ray-tracing engine, our system simulates effects such as varying lighting, refractive index changes, non-normal incidence, specular reflections and shadows, enabling realistic evaluation of new designs. We first demonstrate quantitative agreement between Monte-Carlo simulated absorption and reduced scattering coefficients with those simulated from our Blender system, achieving $16\%$ discrepancy in absorption coefficient and $18\%$ in reduced scattering coefficient. However, we then show that using an empirically derived look-up table the errors reduce to $1\%$ and $0.7\%$ respectively. Next, we simulate SFDI mapping of absorption, scattering and shape for simulated tumour spheroids, demonstrating enhanced contrast. Finally we demonstrate SFDI mapping inside a tubular lumen, which highlighted a important design insight: custom look-up tables must be generated for different longitudinal sections of the lumen. With this approach we achieved $2\%$ absorption error and $2\%$ scattering error. We anticipate our simulation system will aid in the design of novel SFDI systems for key biomedical applications.