Autómata de Lattice Boltzmann para modelar la difusión óptica en materiales translúcidos (Lattice Boltzmann model for optic diffusion in translucid materials)

Abstract

Inspection of translucent objects by near-IR light lasers, is a technique with potential applications for medical diagnosis and in industrial quality assessment due to its tomographic information. In this paper a simulation strategy for light diffusion in translucent materials based on the Lattice Bolzmann (LBM) method is presented. LBM is a cellular automaton that simulates transport phenomena at the macroscopic level through a mesoscopic representation, very easy to implement and highly parallelizable. In our case, the transport of photons in matter is modeled by a collision and absorption matrix defined in each cell of a regular spatial domain. The domain is represented by a 3D grid and the results are visualized by superimposing the elements of a triangular mesh. The model was validated with experimental data measured in a laboratory phantom. The possible applications of the automaton in a visualization engine are also presented.