Accelerating Monte Carlo modeling of structured-light based diffuse optical imaging via "photon sharing"

The increasing use of spatially-modulated imaging and single-pixel detection techniques demands computationally efficient methods for light transport modeling. Herein, we report an easy-to-implement yet significantly more efficient Monte Carlo (MC) method for simultaneously simulating spatially modulated illumination and detection patterns accurately in 3-D complex domains. We have implemented this accelerated algorithm, named "photon sharing", in our open-source MC simulators, reporting 13.6x and 5.5x speedups in mesh- and voxel-based MC benchmarks, respectively. In addition, the proposed algorithm is readily used for accelerating the solving of inverse problems in spatially-modulated imaging systems by building Jaco-bians of all illumination-detection pattern pairs concurrently, resulting in a 12.4-fold speed improvement. https://doi.org/10.1101/2020.02.16.951590