A new forward model for diffuse optical tomography

We propose a nonlocal diffusion equation (NDE) as a new forward model, which uses the concepts of differential operators under the nonlocal vector calculus. The discretization of the NDE is performed using an effective graph-based numerical method (GNM). We evaluate the proposed forward modelling method on a homogeneous slab where the analytical solution is available. Our experiments show that the results of the NDE (discretized by GNM) is quantitatively comparable to the analytical solution. The proposed method has an identical implementation for geometries in two and three dimensions due to the nature of the graph representation.