Light propagation through biological tissue: comparison between Monte Carlo simulation and deterministic models

Optical tomography is a technique which is used to diagnose breast cancer non-invasively at early stage. The challenge faced in optical tomography is that light radiations used in optical tomography scatter a lot in biological tissue. Therefore, need arises to study the behaviour of propagation of light through biological tissue. The study can be done either using stochastic models like Monte Carlo methods or by deterministic models using Finite element methods. An attempt has been made to study the light propagation in biological tissue using both the methods and a comparative study has been carried out.