Reverberation clutter and sources of image degradation in transcostal imaging

The generation of an ultrasound image of human tissue is based on the complex physics of acoustic wave propagation: diffraction, reflection, scattering, frequency dependent attenuation, and nonlinearity. One approach to simulating ultrasound images is to make approximations that can reduce the physics to systems that have a low computational cost. Here a maximalist approach is taken and the full three dimensional wave physics is simulated with finite differences. The objective of this paper is to integrate the Fullwave nonlinear acoustic simulation tool with acoustical maps derived from the National Library of Medicine's Visible Human to generate highly realistic simulations of transcostal imaging. These images and the acoustical field throughout the imaging volume are used to determine the relative importance of nonlinearity, phase aberration, reverberation clutter, and beam shape in image degradation.