Advanced Monte Carlo simulator of the polarization-sensitive optical coherence tomography systems

Simulations of the optical coherence tomography (OCT) systems using the Monte Carlo method is a widely explored research area. However, there are several difficulties that need to be overcome in order to properly model the OCT imaging with the Monte Carlo algorithm. First of all the temporal and the spatial coherence of the scattered light need to be considered, since OCT is based on the interference phenomenon. For the same reason, the polarization state of the scattered light need to be calculated. Moreover, the OCT systems use light beams that can be described by the Gaussian beam model. However, such beams cannot be directly simulated using the standard Monte Carlo algorithm. Different research groups have developed simulators dealing with some of these problems but the Monte Carlo simulator which considers all of them has not been published yet. Here we present the Monte Carlo program allowing to simulate OCT images of heterogeneous light scattering structures. The presented program considers all of the listed problems and allows to model complex sample geometries with layer boundaries described by a set of polygons.