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Monte Carlo Simulation Of The Spatial Resolution And Depth Sensitivity Of Two-Dimensional Optical Imaging Of The Brain, Peifang Tian, Anna Devor, Sara Sakadžić, Anders Dale, David Boas

Peifang Tian

Absorption or fluorescence-based two-dimensional (2-D) optical imaging is widely employed in functional brain imaging. The image is a weighted sum of the real signal from the tissue at different depths. This weighting function is defined as “depth sensitivity.” Characterizing depth sensitivity and spatial resolution is important to better interpret the functional imaging data. However, due to light scattering and absorption in biological tissues, our knowledge of these is incomplete. We use Monte Carlo simulations to carry out a systematic study of spatial resolution and depth sensitivity for 2-D optical imaging methods with configurations typically encountered in functional brain imaging. We …