Real-Time Ultrasoundsimulation for Medical Training

Abstract: This thesis presents a real-time capable GPU-based ultrasound simulator suitable for medical education. The main focus of the simulator is to synthesize realistic looking ultrasound images in real-time including artifacts, which are essential for the interpretation of this data. The simulation is based on a convolution-enhanced ray-tracing approach and uses a deformable meshmodel. Our method advances the state of the art for real-time capable ultrasound simulators by following the path of the ultrasound pulse, which enables better simulation of ultrasound-specific artifacts. An evaluation of our proposed method in comparison with recent generative slicing-based strategies as well as real ultrasound images is performed. Hereby, a gelatin ultrasound phantom containing syringes filled with different media is scanned with a real transducer. The obtained images are then compared to images which are simulated using a slicing-based technique and our proposed method. The particular benefit of our method is the accurate simulation of ultrasound-specific artifacts, like range distortion, refraction and acoustic shadowing