Clouds in the sky get their white colour from the scattering of light. This is a well-understood phenomenon, yet notoriously difficult to compute. Deep-tissue microscopy relies on controlling light scattering within biological tissue, so we take a particular interest in this issue. By mapping Maxwell’s equations onto the structure of a neural network, we were able to scale up light wave scattering calculations on the cloud, more specifically, the Google Colab cloud.

We integrated this into the open source MacroMax EM solver, ideal for computing coherent scattering in highly-heterogeneous materials such as biological tissue. It is straighforward to install and use with Python. Well within 10 minutes, light wave scattering can now be computed throughout a complex 3D structure with all 3 sides >100μm!

Read more about how this works in our recently published paper doi: 10.34133/icomputing.0098.