FullMonteCUDA: a fast, flexible, and accurate GPU-accelerated Monte Carlo simulator for light propagation in turbid media

• Published in: Biomedical optics express 2019-09, Vol.10 (9), p.4711-4726
• Main Authors: Young-Schultz, Tanner, Brown, Stephen, Lilge, Lothar, Betz, Vaughn
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• ISSN: 2156-7085
• DOI: 10.1364/BOE.10.004711

Optimizing light delivery for photodynamic therapy, quantifying tissue optical properties or reconstructing 3D distributions of sources in bioluminescence imaging and absorbers in diffuse optical imaging all involve solving an inverse problem. This can require thousands of forward light propagation simulations to determine the parameters to optimize treatment, image tissue or quantify tissue optical properties, which is time-consuming and computationally expensive. Addressing this problem requires a light propagation simulator that produces results quickly given modelling parameters. In previous work, we developed FullMonteSW: currently the fastest, tetrahedral-mesh, Monte Carlo light propagation simulator written in software. Additional software optimizations showed diminishing performance improvements, so we investigated hardware acceleration methods. This work focuses on FullMonteCUDA: a GPU-accelerated version of FullMonteSW which targets NVIDIA GPUs. FullMonteCUDA has been validated across several benchmark models and, through various GPU-specific optimizations, achieves a 288-936x speedup over the single-threaded, non-vectorized version of FullMonteSW and a 4-13x speedup over the highly optimized, hand-vectorized and multi-threaded version. The increase in performance allows inverse problems to be solved more efficiently and effectively.