TUSX: an accessible toolbox for transcranial ultrasound simulation

Abstract

Normally, the complicated nature of acoustic simulation makes it infeasible for most research groups doing individual transcranial ultrasound studies, hindering interpretation of results and complicating the determination of safety limits. We present here an open-source MATLAB toolbox to perform acoustic simulations using subject-specific medical images for transcranial ultrasound experiments. This toolbox, Transcranial Ultrasound Simulation Toolbox (TUSX), consists of an integrated processing pipeline that takes in structural MR or CT images, processes them for accurate simulation, and runs the simulations using k-Wave, an existing open-source acoustics package. We describe here the processing TUSX performs, along with its reasoning. We also validate its output using real-world pressure measurements in a water tank.