Skip to main content

Hi, I want to measure the time of flight from rays scattered from thick diffusive media, e.g. a 5cm thick block of foam, resin, human tissue, e.g. 30-100 Transport Mean Free Paths, but I am finding hard limitations with the OS settings (see attached files).

As a general example, using the volume physics dialogue box, DLL defined H-G_bulk:  using mu_s = 11.5 mm-1, mu_a = 0.0016 mm-1 and g=0.87, Mean Path=0.09 mm and T = 0.99.

Setting intersections to max: 4000, and segment number to 100k, with Min Rel Intensity (min) 1E-36 (to collect everything as rays can lose many orders of magnitude). This arrangement flags the “Error: Not Enough Intersections Allocated to Finish Ray Trace” for several cm of diffusive media, and indeed if I ignore this, a histogram of #segments shows it is clipped at 4000 (see ZMX and pngs attached). For context I measure the OPL of a ray by using the ray coordinates as vectors (* refractive index) per segment and summing. Splitting is turned OFF because the ZRD lists the splitting branches per ray together and this method would not work.   

Questions:

  1. For my chosen H-G parameters, (Mean Path < 1, T-->1, g-->1), I know that the extreme scattering limits the number of rays I detect at the output of the scatterer. However, is my limiting factor really 4000 intersections/segments? And are these synonymous given my ZRD is only populated with #segments<4000 in the example shown? This would mean that Optic Studio can’t simulate turbid scattering through dense, thick materials like biological tissues, resin or foam, unless those materials were razor thin. I would ideally want to simulate scattering through 50+ transport mean free paths. It just appears that this 4000 value is an unfortunate ceiling to my simulation and where I need to take it.
  2. Are there any references behind the Henyey-Greenstein-bulk.DLL , e.g. where do the equations Mean Path = 1 / (mu_s + mu_a)  and Transmission = mu_s / (mu_s + mu_a) come from? This is just to dispel any confusion in using the empirical coefficients in future simulations.

Thanks for your time,

Kevin

Kevin,

I sympathize.  I have struggled to use this feature to model tissue optics (scatter of light inside of tissue).  For the most part, I’ve given up trying.  There are (x2) big issues that challenge me:

  1. How do I configure the ray tracing parameters of the model (the same concerns you expressed)?
  2. How do I validate the model with an experiment or an independent computation?

My understanding is that the H-G model that was implemented was tested for a specific use case (see Knowledge Base article).  I believe it works well for this case.

However, I have yet to find any literature that validates this computation for dense scatterers (e.g. whole blood).  While the H-G parameters are known for whole blood (see here for example), the scattering sites are so dense that it does not seem possible to come up with a model that OpticStudio can execute.

Most of the scientific literature has put its effort into custom code.  Let me know if you need references.

-B


I can’t speak to the broader issue of how well HG scattering in ZOS correlates with various real-world scenarios.  However, regarding Kevin’s two questions, here are a few thoughts:

1. Yes, the 4,000 intersections per ray will limit the number of scattered rays generated.  However, T = 0.99 means that 1% of the ray energy will be lost per scattering event.  After 4000 scattering events the ray energy is down by a factor of 3.5e-018, which is relatively low.  That may not be low enough for your application, but it seems like a reasonable number for a general scattering problem.  In your case it does appear that the scattering random walk after 4000 scattering events will only propagate ~10-20 mm.

The 4,000 intersections limit has been in place for as long as I can remember.  I don’t know its origin though.  It may have something to do with the computing/memory capability of a typical PC that was available at the time the NSC code was being developed.

 

2 Regarding the origin of the mean path and transmission parameters, this post may be of some help: 

 

Regards,

Jeff


The challenge I faced in tissue optics is that the literature doesn’t use parameters like

  • Intersection limits
  • Minimum power before ignore a ray

to qualify their models.  So for my problems, I couldn’t relate the parameters in OpticStudio to any of the scientific literature.


Convergence of a model (e.g. get the number of rays and minimum power to converge on a stable solution) does not ensure accuracy of the model.

Any ideas regarding how to test this model?

-B


Reply