Simulation of spectral reflectances in human skin tissue using ray tracing and GPU-based Monte Carlo method

We study a simulation of spectral reflectance in human skin tissue using ray-tracing software and the Monte Carlo method on the basis of a graphics processing unit (GPU). An analysis of light propagation using ray-tracing software has several advantages in that it can readily reproduce the complex structure of skin tissue, such as grooves of the skin surface or the boundaries of skin tissue layers, and perform optical simulation with optical elements close to those in a real experiment using only the ray-tracing software. Meanwhile, it has a serious disadvantage in that the simulation time is extremely long because the algorithm is CPU-based. To overcome this disadvantage, we propose a simulation method using the ray-tracing software and a GPU-based Monte Carlo simulation (MCS). The results of the simulation are shown and discussed.