Virtually increased acceptance angle for efficient estimation of spatially resolved reflectance in the subdiffusive regime: a Monte Carlo study

Light propagation in biological tissues is frequently modeled by the Monte Carlo (MC) method, which requires processing of many photon packets to obtain adequate quality of the observed backscattered signal. The computation times further increase for detection schemes with small acceptance angles and hence small fraction of the collected backscattered photon packets. In this paper, we investigate the use of a virtually increased acceptance angle for efficient MC simulation of spatially resolved reflectance and estimation of optical properties by an inverse model. We devise a robust criterion for approximation of the maximum virtual acceptance angle and evaluate the proposed methodology for a wide range of tissue-like optical properties and various source configurations.