Significance: The Monte Carlo (MC) method is widely used as the gold-standard for modeling light propagation inside turbid media, such as human tissues, but combating its inherent stochastic noise requires one to simulate a large number photons, resulting in high computational burdens.

Aim: We aim to develop an effective image denoising technique using deep learning (DL) to dramatically improve the low-photon MC simulation result quality, equivalently bringing further acceleration to the MC method.

Approach: We developed a cascade-network combining DnCNN with UNet, while extending a range of established image denoising neural-network architectures, including DnCNN, UNet, DRUNet, and deep residual-learning for denoising MC renderings (ResMCNet), in handling three-dimensional MC data and compared their performances against model-based denoising algorithms. We also developed a simple yet effective approach to creating synthetic datasets that can be used to train DL-based MC denoisers.

Results: Overall, DL-based image denoising algorithms exhibit significantly higher image quality improvements over traditional model-based denoising algorithms. Among the tested DL denoisers, our cascade network yields a 14 to 19 dB improvement in signal-to-noise ratio, which is equivalent to simulating 25 × to 78 × more photons. Other DL-based methods yielded similar results, with our method performing noticeably better with low-photon inputs and ResMCNet along with DRUNet performing better with high-photon inputs. Our cascade network achieved the highest quality when denoising complex domains, including brain and mouse atlases.

Conclusions: Incorporating state-of-the-art DL denoising techniques can equivalently reduce the computation time of MC simulations by one to two orders of magnitude. Our open-source MC denoising codes and data can be freely accessed at http://mcx.space/.