Simulations of Light Propagation and Thermal Response in Biological Tissues Accelerated by Graphics Processing Unit

In this paper we report on a prototype program for laser-tissue interaction simulation accelerated by graphics processing unit (GPU). We developed a Monte Carlo (MC) model for photon migration in arbitrary shaped turbid media which simulates the light flux inside biological tissues to solve the thermal source term in Pennes' bioheat transfer equation (PBTE). Since both problems are highly parallelizable, we have transformed the underlying mathematical formalism into an OpenCL language code to reduce the computational time-costs. Comparing to sequential implementation, speedup of 210 was achieved in our simulation with GPU. Acceleration benefits are demonstrated separately for MC and PBTE and also for single simulation with both models. The simulation results were obtained in real-time allowing the effective usage in laser interstitial thermal therapy for thermal damage evaluation.