[MCX Newsletters] MCX and MMC v2017.3 are released!

[Qianqian Fang]

Dear MCX and MMC registered users,

I am pleased to let you know that new releases of MCX and MMC, v2017.3,
have arrived! You may access the new software from our website at

http://mcx.space  and   http://mcx.space/#mmc

As a registered user, you can also directly access the updated packages from

https://sourceforge.net/projects/mcx/files/

The updated MCX/MCXLAB are significantly updated and gained both
speed and new features. For example, you can now use "-D P" in the
command line to print a progress bar while running the simulation on
the GPU. You can also use "-D M" or cfg.debuglevel='M' (in MCXLAB)
to return photon raw trajectories for debugging and plotting purposes.
A new flag "-X 1" (or cfg.issaveref=1) enables the recording of diffuse
reflectance/transmittance around the surface of the domain. Other
useful features, such as saving photon exit position/dir with "-x 1" or
defining converging/diverging widefield beams were successfully
ported from MMC to MCX. The code now fully supports Pascal GPUs
and performs particularly well for the later GPU generations.

The detailed release note and ChangeLogs for MCX 2017.3 can be found at

http://mcx.sf.net/cgi-bin/index.cgi?Doc/ReleaseNotes/v2017.3
http://mcx.sf.net/cgi-bin/index.cgi?Doc/ChangeLog

Similarly, MMC/MMCLAB also received polishment and bug fixes.
A major effort was to develop and validate a fast Jacobian building
approach using the "replay" feature (for both MCX and MMC). MCX
and MMC can quickly calculate time-resolved Jacobians for both mua
and mus (paper submission pending) for solving the inverse problems.
The new MMC/MMCLAB also supports widefield detectors for the first time.

For details, please browse MMC 2017.3's release notes

http://mcx.sf.net/cgi-bin/index.cgi?MMC/Doc/ReleaseNotes/v2017.3

I would like to thank my students Fanny Nina-Paravecino and Leiming Yu,
(both are co-mentored with Prof David Kaeli), Ruoyang Yao (co-mentored
with Prof. Xavier Intes at RPI) and visiting student Gustavo Maia for
their dedication and efforts for improving these codes. I also want to
thank all the MCX/MMC users who had provided valuable feedback
via our forums. Last, but not the least, I'd like to than NIH/NIGMS for
the funding support (R01-GM114365) to make this project possible!

Please let me know if you have any questions using the new features.

thank you

Qianqian



PS: As a reminder, started from June 2016, we announced a nightly-build
service that automatically compiles and uploads the latest MCX/MMC
packages to our website on a daily basis. These are available at

http://mcx.space/nightly/

You are encouraged to test the nightly-build software and provide
us your feedback.