Mathematical and numerical modeling of
medical ultrasound wave propagation
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




The most recent update of this page was done 19/01-2011 by Åsmund Ødegård