Development of perturbation Monte Carlo methods for polarized light transport in a discrete particle scattering model.

We present a polarization-sensitive, transport-rigorous perturbation Monte Carlo (pMC) method to model the impact of optical property changes on reflectance measurements within a discrete particle scattering model. The model consists of three log-normally distributed populations of Mie scatterers that approximate biologically relevant cervical tissue properties. Our method provides reflectance estimates for perturbations across wavelength and/or scattering model parameters. We test our pMC model performance by perturbing across number densities and mean particle radii, and compare pMC reflectance estimates with those obtained from conventional Monte Carlo simulations. These tests allow us to explore different factors that control pMC performance and to evaluate the gains in computational efficiency that our pMC method provides.