Make the most of MUST, an open-source Matlab UltraSound Toolbox

Abstract : Medical ultrasound imaging requires recurring use of elementary principles, namely, the choice of the transducer, the design of the emitted waves and their wavefronts (e.g. focused or wide), the demodulation of the received signals, their beamforming, and their post-processing to generate B-mode or flow images. The ultrasound signals used for research purposes can be synthetic or acquired. To make the whole pipeline easily accessible to many researchers and students, the objective was to provide an open-access toolbox, widely documented, and adapted to ultrasound imaging research involving experimental or simulation methods. The MUST Matlab UltraSound Toolbox contains algorithms that focus on the development, simulation, and analysis of ultrasound signals for medical imaging. The user can design various ultrasound-imaging scenarios and analyze their performance using simulated or acquired data. The MUST functions allow studying the characteristics of transducers and waveforms, analyze signals, and construct ultrasound images. The many examples provide a starting point for students and researchers to quickly gain an understanding of the essentials of ultrasound imaging. The simulators integrated into MUST provide very realistic acoustic pressure fields and ultrasound images. The Matlab MUST toolbox is freely available at https://www.biomecardio.com/MUST. Before engaging in advanced ultrasound techniques and comparing them with so-called standard methods, it is necessary to have a good understanding of the latter and their advantages and limitations. With this in mind, the MUST toolbox includes everything needed for comprehensive ultrasound imaging: simulators of acoustic pressure fields and backscattered RF signals, delay-and-sum beamforming, B-mode imaging, wall filtering, color or vector Doppler, speckle tracking... The documentation and open access facilitate easy and intuitive use. If the MUST toolbox proves to be interesting, the author plans to integrate advanced features depending on the demands of the ultrasound community.