New paper preprint - implicit MMC for complex tissues
October 11, 2020
Checkout our newly submitted paper on a highly scalable and memory efficient MMC approach to model very complex tissue structures. The implicit MMC (iMMC) code was developed by Yaoshen, and will be available in our next MMC release.
MCX_MMC v2020 was announced. They have packed numerous commits accumulated over the past 16 months, including the first MCX-CL release that matches MCX in features, the first GPU-based MMC, win installer, and saving #openjdata outputs.
With the kind support from many of our users, the MCX grant has been successfully renewed! Over the past 5 years, the MCX project has grown tremendously. We have more than quadrupled the total number of registered users (500 to 2400) and the number of citations (250 to 1100). Many of the new methods and features have been developed, published, and added to our open-source toolkit; mcx/mmc are now available in Fedora and Winget, and will soon become available in Debian/Ubuntu. Our software has found use in a wide range of applications and was increasingly tested and trusted by many. We feel truly honored to contribute our small part to many of your endeavors, and would be very much eager to share our new development with you down the path. In the next chapter of the MCX project, we have planed many exciting new milestones, many of which are already under heavy development. Stay tuned, more will come!
Try our new all-in-one Windows installer for MCX/MMC
July 5, 2020
We created a Windows all-in-one installer for our MCX/MMC users to automate the installation and settings on Windows. It contains both binaries and MATLAB toolboxes for all of our software components.
Photon-sharing paper is published on Optics Letters
May 12, 2020
Congratulations to our PhD student Shijie Yan for publishing a new paper on Optics Letters. In this method, one can simultaneously simulate many pattered light sources using our MCX/MMC simulators. This feature is now supported in our open-source software.
A new paper on photobiomodulation (PMB) dosimetry is in press on Neurophotonics
Janunary 7, 2019
In collaboration with Prof. Paolo Cassano from MGH, we performed a Monte Carlo simulation based study on the illumination positions (transcranial and intranasal) and 3D dosimetry for photobiomodulation (low-light therapy) using our in-house simulators to better guide the design of PMB treatment procedures and devices. This paper is in press on Neurophotonics.
New paper on Monte Carlo simulation denoising
November 30, 2018
Our paper on denoising Monte Carlo simulation data is now available online at the JBO website in the coming issue. PDF.
Full citation information:
Yaoshen Yuan, Leiming Yu, Zafer Doğan, Qianqian Fang, "Graphics processing units-accelerated adaptive non-local means filter for denoising three-dimensional Monte Carlo photon transport simulations," J. of Biomedical Optics, 23(12), 121618 (2018).
Fanglab presented their work towards a fiberless, modular, and wearable full-head fNIRS system with built-in 3D self-calibrating orientation sensor network at the 2018 fNIRS Conference held in Tokyo, Japan.
Fanglab was awarded a new NIH R01 grant for next-gen fNIRS
September 21, 2018
The project aims to advance optical brain imaging to the next generation by developing an ultra-portable, modular, and fiberless optical brain imaging platform. The proposed imaging system can be used to monitor human brain activities in natural environments.
[#MCX1.0]
MCX 1.0 and MMC 1.0 have arrived!
August 24, 2018
After nearly 10 years of continuous development, it is our great pleasure to announce that MCX 1.0 (v2018) has finally arrived! In the meantime, MMC has also arrived at its v1.0 milestone, after its initially publication in 2010. Moreover, we also proudly announce the first stable release of MCX-OpenCL (or MCXCL) - a "clone" of MCX that can run on nearly all CPUs and GPUs across many vendors.
Researchers at the Boston Children's Hospital (Jason Sutin, Ivy Lin, Ellen Grant, and Julia Tatz) had ported MCX to the cloud using the Redhat Kubernetes and containers, and Prof. Ellen Grant will give a demo of the software during the Redhat Developer Conference this Wed.
FangLab students presented 9 posters at OSA Biophotonics Congress
April 3, 2018
Our group presented 9 posters at the OSA Biophotonics Congress: check out our published conference papers (PDF available)
This year, the MCX workshop was held during the first day of the OSA Biophotnics Conference in Hollywood Florida. We implemented a lot of feedback from the 2017 workshop in Boston to provide what we hope were helpful tips, insight, and knowledge on how to best take advantage of our in-house developed high-performance Monte Carlo photon transport simulation platforms. Relive the experience!
Our graduate student Xin Sun was featured in the Northeastern News working on our anatomically accurate multi-layered full-head optical phantom (together with our Bioengineering undergraduate student Sule Sahin).
Morris Named 2018 MIT Impact Fellow
January 15, 2018
Morris Vanegas was just named a 2018 MIT Impact Fellow! The program is tailored towards career development for post-doctoral and advanced pre-doctoral trainees. The group and one-on-one mentoring helps fellows articulate the impact of their research to a brach audience and help identify actionable opportunities to strengthen their work focus. See details of the Impact Program here.
Morris Named 2018 Dent Scholar
November 9, 2017
Morris Vanegas was just named a 2018 Dent The Future Scholar! This award comes with a complimentary pass to Dent 2018, a flagship conference for a community of entrepreneurs, executives and creatives who are driven to "put a dent in the universe." Dent looks for scholars who work at the intersection of art, science, and impact. Morris was chosen for his work at co-director of the MIT Open Mind::Open Art Gallery in January 2017. See details of Dent 2018 here.
New Paper Published
January 26, 2018
Our paper is now published online at the JBO website in the coming issue. [ PDF ].
Full citation information:
Leiming Yu, Fanny Nina-Paravecino, David Kaeli, Qianqian Fang, "Scalable and massively parallel Monte Carlo photon transport simulations for heterogeneous computing platforms," J. Biomed. Opt. 23(1), 010504 (2018).
A manuscript entitled, "Fast and high-quality tetrahedral mesh generation from neuroanatomical scans" was submitted to a journal. The pre-print of the manuscipt is available at http://arxiv.org/abs/1708.08954.
IDEA Venture Accelerator Prototype Funding Winner!
August 22, 2017
Morris Vanegas was recently awarded funds to complete his prototype of a portable Internet of Things (IoT) suite of sensors to capture temporal artist physiological and environmental data by Northeastern's IDEA Venture Accelerator. The stand-alone 3 shelf stand and light also uses OpenCV to non-invasively capture an artist's work. The images and data are then presented in an interactive GUI.
MCX Workshop 2017 at ISEC
August 8-9, 2017
Thanks to those that attended our 1st two-day workshop on Monte Carlo eXtreme for biomedical optics research at ISEC on August 8th and 9th. We hope we were able to provide our software users with tips, insight, and knowledge on how to best take advantage of our in-house developed high-performance Monte Carlo photon transport simulation platforms. Many thanks to our speakers and COTI student presenters, as well as to the attendees for their active participation and discussions. We plan on making this an annual event, so feel free to reach out if you want to attend in the future. See the images below to relive the experience!
For more details, including tutorials from the event, click here.
Build your own GPU rack!
In support of our MCX 2017 workshop, Dr. Fang and Morris built a rack that houses 12 GPUS, 3 power supplies, and is made of 80-20s extrusion bars. Users will be able to run monte-carlo simulations by remoting into these machines. A quick test of 5x 1080Ti GPUs with a single power supply was able to simulate 311955.21 photons per ms, making it our fastest setup to date!
We've also documented the process of building the GPU rack below:
Looking for a postdoc position?
As our lab continues to expand, we are looking for highly qualified candidates for two postdocs in the near-term for NIH-funded research projects. If you, or someone you know, is a great fit and would like to join our team located at ISEC, reach out to us!
Optics Engineering
We are also looking for a postdoc with a background in optical instrumentation, medical device design, and mobile-app development. A strong electrical engineering background would be a plus. Apply here!
Computational Biophotonics
This position is perfect for someone with a strong background in computational algorithm development, GPU computing, and computational physics. Proficiency in C/matlab software development is a necessity. Apply here!