Abstract—The linear acoustic wave equation has been widely used for modeling the ultrasound propagation through biological tissues. However, the nonlinear effect can’t be neglected when transmitting an ultrasound beam of high frequency or high amplitude. The commonly used nonlinear models for ultrasound imaging simulation include the KZK and the Full-wave model. This article firstly solves the full-wave equation numerically by using the Finite Difference Time Domain (FDTD) method. Experiments are then conducted to verify the accuracy of the numerical solution. A plane-wave imaging algorithm is consequently designed based on the full-wave simulation. The plane-wave imaging simulation based on the full-wave model can get the similar imaging quality as the simulation based on the KZK model with focused beam scanning mode. Simulation results prove that, compared with KZK (CREANUIS), which is limited by the paraxial approximation, more flexible excitation setup and more feedback information can be acquired in the simulation based on the full-wave model and the FDTD. Thus it’s helpful to better study nonlinear ultrasound.

Index Terms—Nonlinear propagation, full-wave, simulation, CREANUIS.

The authors are with the Department of Electronic Engineering of Fudan University, Shanghai, China, 200030 (e-mail: yywang@ fudan.edu.cn).

Cite: Jinxin Zhao, Xingsong Li, Jinhua Yu, and Yuanyuan Wang, "Nonlinear Ultrasound Simulation Based on Full-Wave Model and Comparisons with KZK," International Journal of Bioscience, Biochemistry and Bioinformatics vol. 4, no. 5, pp. 322-325, 2014.