Photon diffusion in a homogeneous medium bounded externally or internally by an infinitely long circular cylindrical applicator. I. Steady-state theory.

This work presents an analytic treatment for photon diffusion in a homogeneous medium bounded externally or internally by an infinitely long circular cylindrical applicator. Focusing initially on the steady-state condition, the photon diffusion in these two geometries is solved in cylindrical coordinates by using modified Bessel functions and by applying the extrapolated boundary condition. For large cylinder diameter, the analytic solutions may be simplified to a format employing the physical source and its image source with respect to a semi-infinite geometry and a radius-dependent term to account for the shape and dimension of the cylinder. The analytic solutions and their approximations are evaluated numerically to demonstrate qualitatively the effect of the applicator curvature--either concave or convex--and the radius on the photon fluence rate as a function of the source-detector distance, in comparison with that in the semi-infinite geometry. This work is subjected to quantitative examination in a coming second part and possible extension to time-resolved analysis.