Full-Wave Simulations of Tomographic Optical Imaging Through Augmented Partial Factorization

Label-free optical imaging inside scattering media is important for many disciplines. One challenge is that the ground-truth structure is often unknown, so one cannot rigorously assess and compare different imaging schemes. Full-wave simulations can address this issue, but the heavy computing cost has restricted them to small, typically weakly scattering, systems. Here we use a recently introduced “augmented partial factorization” method to enable full-wave simulations of tomographic optical imaging deep inside multiple-scattering media. We also provide a unifying framework that models different scattering-based imaging methods including reflectance confocal microscopy, optical coherence tomography and microscopy, interferometric synthetic aperture microscopy, and the recently proposed scattering matrix tomography in the same virtual setup, so they can be directly compared to the ground truth and against each other. The ground truth enables the identification of artifacts that would typically be mistaken as being correct while setting a rigorous and uniform standard across different methods. By leveraging the latest advances in computational electromagnetics, this work brings the power, versatility, and convenience of full-wave modeling to deep imaging in the multiple-scattering regime.