The Toast++ software suite for forward and inverse modeling in optical tomography

Abstract

We present the Toast++ open-source software environment for solving the forward and inverse problems in diffuse optical tomography (DOT). The software suite consists of a set of libraries to simulate near-infrared light propagation in highly scattering media with complex boundaries and heterogeneous internal parameter distribution, based on a finite-element solver. Steady-state, time- and frequency-domain data acquisition systems can be modeled. The forward solver is implemented in C++ and supports performance acceleration with parallelization for shared and distributed memory architectures, as well as graphics processing computation. Building on the numerical forward solver, Toast++ contains model-based iterative inverse solvers for reconstructing the volume distribution of absorption and scattering parameters from boundary measurements of light transmission. A range of regularization methods are provided, including the possibility of incorporating prior knowledge of internal structure. The user can link to the Toast++ libraries either directly to compile application programs for DOT, or make use of the included MATLAB and PYTHON bindings to generate script-based solutions. This approach allows rapid prototyping and provides a rich toolset in both environments for debugging, testing, and visualization.