Distributed Simulations for 3D Ultrasound Computer Tomography: Acoustic wave simulations for a new breast cancer imaging device - Softcover

More than 10% of all women in the western world get breast cancer. High sensitivity to detect tumors with a size of 5mm and the use of non-ionising radiation are desirable to avoid the development of metastases. Ultrasound Computer Tomography (USCT) currently developed at KIT promises to be such a device. The USCT project requires precise simulation data of realistic breast models for the optimisation and further development. Up to now it was not possible to get such simulations within a time frame of roughly one day of computing time. The simulations presented in this work numerically solve the wave equation of the problem. The main approximation made is the assumption that density changes are negligible in human tissue. The errors introduced by this assumption are analysed in this work. An existing analytical solution for plane waves scattered at a sphere was used to verify the results of the developed numerical solution. Distributed processing accelerated the presented simulations. A Matlab development environment was implemented, which enables the users to distribute arbitrary Matlab tasks to a cluster or to cloud computing resources.

Dr. Marcus Hardt studied physics at RWTH-Aachen until 2001. 1999 he founded theWebSmart Technology GmbH and worked as IT freelancer until 2002. Since then heis employed as full time scientist at Karlsruhe Institute for Technology (KIT),were he collaborated in several in EU-Projects related to grid computing.