Accelerating Two-Dimensional k-Wave Ultrasound Simulations Through Pruned FFT: A Treatment Planning Optimisation

Wave propagation simulations are foundational tools across scientific and medical
applications, yet their computational demands become significant for
high-resolution simulations, particularly in medical applications where precise
representation of different tissue geometries is crucial. This paper presents
a novel approach to accelerate 2D wave propagation simulations in the k-Wave
toolbox. Our method focuses on optimising Fourier transform computations through
spectrum pruning. The Acoustic Field Propagator along with a bisection pruning
algorithm to estimate the position of the spectral coefficients is used. Through
these optimisations, our approach achieves significant performance gains,
demonstrating speedups of up to 1.8x for large simulation domains. Experimental
evaluation on medical ultrasound simulations demonstrates that the proposed
method achieves focal point errors below 1% with minimal focus position shifts,
while skipping up to 90% of spectral coefficients in large domains. This results
in a significant simulation time reduction by half over the large simulation
domains. Although the proposed method primarily focuses on accelerating k-Wave
toolbox wave propagation simulation, it could be generally applied to wave
propagation problems.