Full-wave simulations of tomographic optical imaging inside scattering media

Abstract: Label-free tomographic optical imaging inside scattering media is important for medical diagnosis, biological science, colloidal physics, and device inspection. An outstanding challenge is that the ground-truth structure is often unknown, so one cannot rigorously assess and compare different imaging schemes. Here we demonstrate full-wave simulations of tomographic optical imaging deep inside scattering media, which provide not only the ground truth but also the flexibility to tailor the structure and the convenience of comparing different imaging schemes in the same virtual setup with minimal cost. We model reflectance confocal microscopy, optical coherence tomography, optical coherence microscopy, interferometric synthetic aperture microscopy, and the recently proposed scattering matrix tomography for imaging nanoparticle targets embedded in a large scattering medium. 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. This work shows how full-wave simulations can fill the gaps of experiments for studying imaging inside scattering media.