Heuristic absorption calculation in bilayered media from a white Monte Carlo dataset

Monte Carlo (MC) simulations can adequately describe photon migration in layered media; however, storing and querying the resulting dataset may be computationally prohibitive when detailed path data are needed for each photon trajectory. A heuristic approach that significantly reduces the stored information to the average path length traveled by the photons detected in each layer is proposed. Its accuracy is evaluated by comparing it with the exact time point spread function (TPSF) for a bilayered medium. This method, almost exact for small variations in absorption, is potentially useful to provide a small dataset for lookup tables to be used in inverse problems.