This paper describes an extension of the perturbation Monte Carlo method to model light transport when the phase function is arbitrarily perturbed. Current perturbation Monte Carlo methods allow perturbation of both the scattering and absorption coefficients, however, the phase function can not be varied. The more complex method we develop and test here is not limited in this way. We derive a rigorous perturbation Monte Carlo extension that can be applied to a large family of important biomedical light transport problems and demonstrate its greater computational efficiency compared with using conventional Monte Carlo simulations to produce forward transport problem solutions. The gains of the perturbation method occur because only a single baseline Monte Carlo simulation is needed to obtain forward solutions to other closely related problems whose input is described by perturbing one or more parameters from the input of the baseline problem. The new perturbation Monte Carlo methods are tested using tissue light scattering parameters relevant to epithelia where many tumors originate. The tissue model has parameters for the number density and average size of three classes of scatterers; whole nuclei, organelles such as lysosomes and mitochondria, and small particles such as ribosomes or large protein complexes. When these parameters or the wavelength is varied the scattering coefficient and the phase function vary. Perturbation calculations give accurate results over variations of ∼15-25% of the scattering parameters.
Keywords: (170.0170) Medical optics and biotechnology; (170.3660) Light propagation in tissues; (170.6510) Spectroscopy, tissue diagnostics; (170.6935) Tissue characterization.