The utility of a marched absorbing layer boundary condition in the finite element analysis of diffuse photon density wave propagation in tissues relevant to breast imaging.

Here we introduce a marched absorbing layer boundary condition for the finite element analysis of diffuse photon density wave propagation in tissues. We investigated and optimized the parameters required to set up a marched absorbing layer boundary for diffuse photon density wave propagation in media with different absorption and scattering coefficients. Comparing with using a breast model connected to a large substrate and a Robin boundary condition, using a marched absorbing layer boundary condition to replace part of the large base reduced the time for forward modeling by about 30%.