A Recent Study on Hardware Accelerated Monte Carlo Modeling of Light Propagation in Biological Tissues

The Monte Carlo (MC) method is the gold standard in photon migration through 3D media with spatially varying optical properties. MC offers excellent accuracy, easy-to-program and straightforward parallelization. In this study we summarize the recent advances in accelerating simulations of light propagation in biological tissues. The systematic literature review method is involved selecting the relevant studies for the research. With this approach research questions regarding the acceleration techniques are formulated and additional selection criteria are applied. The selected studies are analyzed and the research questions are answered. We discovered that there are several possibilities for accelerating the MC code and the CUDA platform is used in more than 60% of all studies. We also discovered that the trend in GPU acceleration with CUDA has continued in last two years.