Vol. 44, Issue 1, pp. 69-77 (2014)

Abstract

Propagation of a short pulse through human breast tissues is studied by numerically solving the diffuse equation. Different numerical methods, such as Monte Carlo and finite difference time domain, have been used to study the short pulse laser propagation through biological tissues. In this paper, we use boundary integral method to study the laser pulse–tissue interaction. The diffuse equation is used to examine the propagation of laser into biological tissues, and boundary integral method is used to alter this equation to the integral form and the result is solved by using boundary element method. To verify the precision of a boundary element method code, we compared the obtained results with those obtained by finite difference time domain method. In addition, the effects of different optical parameters of breast tissues, i.e., reduced scattering and absorption coefficients, on time evolution of a diffusely reflected pulse are studied.