[MCX Newsletters] New Mesh-based Monte Carlo (MMC) release 2016.1

[Qianqian Fang]

Dear MCX and MMC registered users,

Happy New Year!

I am excited to let you know a new release of Mesh-based Monte Carlo
(MMC) is now ready for download. The new software packages
are available at

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

It has been exactly two years since the previous release (0.9.5) was
announced, but we have never stopped improving MMC. Over the past
two years, we've made 73 commits, 115 file changes with
3,981 lines of additions and 567 lines of deletions. The new software
is now more robust, with more features, and is more convenient to use.

With the new release, one can now use one of the dozen complex
source/detector forms (SFDI, Gaussian, planar beams, cone beams,
arbitrary 2D patterns etc) similar to the latest releases of MCX. This
was achieved through an elegant mesh-retessellation algorithm which
adds only marginal overhead to the computation. The details of this
algorithm is described in a paper published this month on BOE:

Ruoyao Yao, Xavier Intes, Qianqian Fang, "Generalized mesh-based Monte Carlo for wide-field illumination and detection via mesh retessellation," Biomed. Optics Express, 7(1), 171-184 (2016)

Moreover, all area-sources support divergence and convergence
through a user specified focal length parameter (this feature will
be back-ported to MCX).

Another addition we made in this release is the MMCLAB for 64bit
Windows. Now MMCLAB can be launched on all major OS platforms.

Aside from the new features, we've corrected a list of critical bugs that
had caused crashes and inaccurate results. If you are using an older release
of MMC, we urge you to upgrade your software to take advantage the
latest software updates.

To read the full Release Notes of the new software, please browse

http://mcx.sourceforge.net/cgi-bin/index.cgi?MMC/Doc/ReleaseNotes/1.0-beta

and the detailed ChanageLogs at

http://mcx.sourceforge.net/cgi-bin/index.cgi?MMC/ChangeLog

The v2016.1 is the first release made under the new time-based release
strategy. In the future, we will roll out 4 releases every year (1 release per
3 months), so that you can always get the latest features without long wait.

This release is made possible with the funding support from NIH/NIGMS
(under grant#R01-GM114365). This work is also a result of collaboration
with Dr. Xavier Intes' group at RPI. Particularly, I'd like to thank Ruoyang Yao
for his key contributions in implementing the wide-field sources/detectors.

Qianqian