Fast ultrasound beam prediction for linear and regular two-dimensional arrays

Real-time beam predictions are desirable for ultra sound therapy guidance, as treatment planning requires individualized computations. To address the long-standing issue of the computational burden associated with calculating the acoustic field in large volumes, we use modern graphics processing units to accelerate the calculation of near-field pressure fields for therapeutic ultrasound arrays. First, we accelerate field computations for single rectangular pistons by employing the Fast Near-field Method (FNM) to accurately and efficiently estimate the complex near-field wave patterns in homogeneous media, and results are compared to the Rayleigh-Sommerfeld method. We then compute beam patterns of ID and 2D piston arrays using pre-calculated beam patterns from a single piston. Our results show that these algorithms can benefit greatly from GPU computing hardware, exceeding a modern CPU by a factor of over 100. For a single rectangular piston, the FNM is able to calculate a 0.01% accurate field within 30 ns per field point. Furthermore, we demonstrate calculation speeds for arrays of up to 11.5 × 10⁹ field points per second. Beam volumes containing 256³ field points are calculated within one second for arrays containing up to 512 pistons, thus, facilitating future real-time thermal dose predictions.