Coupling between radiative transport and diffusion approximation for enhanced near-field photon-migration modeling based on transient photon kinetics

Coupling between transport theory and its diffusion approximation in subdomain-based hybrid models for enhanced description of near-field photon-migration can be computationally complex, or even physically inaccurate. We report on a physically consistent coupling method that links the transport and diffusion physics of the photons according to transient photon kinetics, where distribution of the fully diffusive photons at a transition time is provided by a computation-saving auxiliary time-domain diffusion solution. This serves as a complementary or complete isotropic source of the temporally integrated transport equation over the early stage and the diffusion equation over the late stage, respectively, from which the early and late photo-densities can be acquired independently and summed up to achieve steady-state modeling of the whole transport process. The proposed scheme is validated with numerical simulations for a cubic geometry. (C) 2016 Society of Photo-Optical Instrumentation Engineers (SPIE)