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In recent years many new ultrasound-based clinical techniques have been
developed for a broad range of medical applications, but bringing laboratory
research into routine clinical practice can take years and requires lots of
money. The dramatic advance of computer hardware and software in the last
decade has made computer simulation a viable devise to complement and expedite
medical ultrasound research. Due to the complex biomechanical and geometric
properties of human tissues such as strong heterogeneity, nonlinearity and
irregular shapes, the partial differential equation (PDE) modeling of
ultrasound propagation becomes quite complicated and leads to computationally
intensive simulation. This project aims to address the challenging issues
facing medical ultrasound propagation simulation, in particular, relating to
some new clinical techniques. Among them are:
- to research new PDE models which accurately describe the frequency-dependent
attenuation of ultrasound propagation through dissipative human tissues;
to develop effective numerical schemes and packages of ultrasound propagation
mainly based on applying C++ finite element method (FEM) library Diffpack(r)
and
parallel computing;
- to study simulation of Dr. Richter's recent clinical amplitude/velocity
imaging technique for ultrasound breast tumor with special emphases on
investigating the sensitivity of ultrasound imaging versus wave velocity change
and the recognizability of small breast lesions in terms of ultrasound
resolution;
- to simulate ultrasound detection of bone density which involves both
pressure and shear waves.
Current Status
Below we show some pictures of what we currently can do with our simulator.
Here, we show a pulsed bessel beam and a x-wave travelling in homogeneous
medium.
These pictures show a pulsed bessel beam and a x-wave travelling in
inhomogeneous medium. The inhomogeneity is an abrupt boundary change.
Related Projects
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