Fast ultrasound imaging simulation in K-space

Most available ultrasound imaging simulation methods are based on the spatial impulse response approach. The execution speed of such a simulation is of the order of days for one heart-sized frame using desktop computers. For some applications, the accuracy of such rigorous simulation approaches is not necessary. This work outlines a much faster 3-D ultrasound imaging simulation approach that can be applied to tasks like simulating 3-D ultrasound images for speckle-tracking. The increased speed of the proposed simulation method is based primarily on the approximation that the point spread function is set to be spatially invariant, which is a reasonably good approximation when using polar coordinates for simulating images from phased arrays with constant aperture. Ultrasound images are found as the convolution of the PSF and an object of sparsely distributed scatterers. The scatterers are passed through an anti-aliasing filter before insertion into a regular beam-space grid to reduce the bandwidth and significantly reduce the amount of data. A comparison with the well-established simulation software package field II has been made. A simulation of a cyst image using the same input object was found to be in the order of 7000 times slower than the presented method. Following these considerations, the proposed simulation method can be a rapid and valuable tool for working with 3-D ultrasound imaging and in particular 3-D speckle-tracking.