Evaluation of a parallel FDTD code and application to modeling of light scattering by deformed red blood cells

A parallel Finite-Difference-Time-Domain (FDTD) code has been developed to numerically model the elastic light scattering by biological cells. Extensive validation and evaluation on various computing clusters demonstrated the high performance of the parallel code and its significant potential of reducing the computational cost of the FDTD method with low cost computer clusters. The parallel FDTD code has been used to study the problem of light scattering by a human red blood cell (RBC) of a deformed shape in terms of the angular distributions of the Mueller matrix elements. The dependence of the Mueller matrix elements on the shape and orientation of the deformed RBC has been investigated. Analysis of these data provides valuable insight on determination of the RBC shapes using the method of elastic light scattering measurements. (C) 2005 Optical Society of America.