  Label-free tomographic optical imaging inside scattering media is important
for medical diagnosis, biological science, colloidal physics, and device
inspection. An outstanding challenge is that the ground-truth structure is
often unknown, so one cannot rigorously assess and compare different imaging
schemes. Here we demonstrate full-wave simulations of tomographic optical
imaging deep inside scattering media, which provide not only the ground truth
but also the flexibility to tailor the structure and the convenience of
comparing different imaging schemes in the same virtual setup with minimal
cost. We model reflectance confocal microscopy, optical coherence tomography,
optical coherence microscopy, interferometric synthetic aperture microscopy,
and the recently proposed scattering matrix tomography for imaging nanoparticle
targets embedded in a large scattering medium. The ground truth enables the
identification of artifacts that would typically be mistaken as being correct
while setting a rigorous and uniform standard across different methods. This
work shows how full-wave simulations can fill the gaps of experiments for
studying imaging inside scattering media.
