A mouse optical simulation environment (MOSE) to investigate bioluminescent phenomena in the living mouse with the Monte Carlo method.

RATIONALE AND OBJECTIVES As an important part of bioluminescence tomography, which is a newly developed optical imaging modality, mouse optical simulation environment (MOSE) is developed to simulate bioluminescent phenomena in the living mouse and to predict bioluminescent signals detectable outside the mouse. This simulator is dedicated to small animal optical imaging based on bioluminescence. MATERIALS AND METHODS With the parameters of biological tissues, bioluminescent sources, and charge coupled device (CCD) detectors, the 2-dimensional/3-dimensional MOSE simulates the whole process of the light propagation in 2-dimensional/3-dimensional biological tissues using the Monte Carlo method. Both the implementation details and the software architecture are described in this article. RESULTS The software system is implemented in the Visual C++ programming language with the OpenGL techniques and has a user-friendly interface facilitating interactions relevant to bioluminescent imaging. The accuracy of the system is verified by comparing the MOSE results with independent data from analytic solutions and commercial software. CONCLUSION As shown in our simulation and analysis, the MOSE is accurate, flexible, and efficient to simulate the photon propagation for bioluminescence tomography. With graduate refinements and enhancements, it is hoped that the MOSE will become a standard tool for bioluminescence tomography.