SIMUS: an open-source simulator for ultrasound imaging. Part II: comparison with three popular simulators

TL;DR

This paper evaluates the SIMUS ultrasound simulator by comparing its generated pressure fields with those from three established simulators, demonstrating its reliability and accuracy in realistic ultrasound imaging simulations.

Contribution

The paper provides a comparative analysis of SIMUS against popular simulators, validating its effectiveness for ultrasound imaging simulations in homogeneous media.

Findings

SIMUS produces pressure fields similar to Field II and k-Wave.

Verasonics simulator shows significant differences from SIMUS and k-Wave.

SIMUS is reliable for realistic ultrasound simulation tasks.

Abstract

Computational ultrasound imaging has become a well-established methodology in the ultrasound community. In the accompanying paper (part I), we described a new ultrasound simulator (SIMUS) for Matlab, which belongs to the Matlab UltraSound Toolbox (MUST). SIMUS can generate pressure fields and radiofrequency RF signals for simulations in medical ultrasound imaging. It works in a harmonic domain and uses linear equations derived from far-field and paraxial approximations. In this article (part II), we illustrate how SIMUS compares with three popular ultrasound simulators (Field II, k-Wave, and Verasonics) for a homogeneous medium. We designed different transmit sequences (focused, planar, and diverging wavefronts) and calculated the corresponding 2-D and 3-D (with elevation focusing) RMS pressure fields. SIMUS produced pressure fields similar to those of Field II and k-Wave. The acoustic fields provided by the Verasonics simulator were significantly different from those of SIMUS and k-Wave, although the overall appearance remained consistent. Our simulations tend to demonstrate that SIMUS is reliable and can be used on a par with Field II and k-Wave for realistic ultrasound simulations.