A finite difference method to solve radiative transfer equation with natural boundary condition

作者：Jin Meng; Gao Feng^*; Ma Wen Juan; Yang Fang; Zhao Hui Juan

来源：Journal of Tianjin University, 2011, 44(9): 816-822.

• Biological tissues
• Diffuse optical tomography
• Finite-difference solution
• Internal reflection effects
• Monte Carlo Simulation
• Natural boundary condition
• Radiative transfer equation
• Radiative transfer equations

The radiative transfer equation(RTE) with the inflow-zero boundary condition is currently increasingly adopted as a universally applicable photon-migration model in the tissues. However, since biological tissues have normally different refractive indexes from the surroundings such as air, this inflow-zero boundary condition can not accurately model the behavior of photons that hit the boundary, leading to large errors in retrieval or image reconstruction of the optical properties. To overcome the limitations, the natural boundary condition that takes into account the internal reflection effect should be considered. A joint discrete-ordinate and finite-difference solution to the steadystate RTE with the natural boundary condition is proposed and validated by comparison with the Monte-Carlo simulations.

• 出版日期2011
• 单位天津大学