Monte Carlo modeling of light propagation in highly scattering tissue--I: Model predictions and comparison with diffusion theory.

Using optical interaction coefficients typical of mammalian soft tissues in the red and near infrared regions of the spectrum, calculations of fluence-depth distributions, effective penetration depths and diffuse reflectance from two models of radiative transfer, diffusion theory, and Monte Carlo simulation are compared for a semi-infinite medium. The predictions from diffusion theory are shown to be increasingly inaccurate as the albedo tends to zero and/or the average cosine of scatter tends to unity.