HPC Modeling of Coupled Elastic-Acoustic Wave Propagation in Biological Media: Numerical Validation

Abstract

Accurate numerical models of sound propagation through biological media are an important tool for many applications, from medical physics to studying the auditory system of humans or other animals. We model high-frequency elastic and acoustic wave propagation through the head anatomy of a common bottlenose dolphin (Tursiops truncatus), by means of the open-source software packages \textsc{specfem3d}, based on the spectral-element method, and \textsc{{\it k}-wave}, based on the pseudospectral method. To achieve sufficiently high performance, we ported the latter solver to C++, for Multi-GPU CUDA support via the slab-decomposition of three-dimensional Fast Fourier Transform approach. Because the two schemes differ fundamentally in how the propagation medium is discretized and internal (in particular fluid-solid) interfaces are treated, similarity between modeled signals across methods is a legitimate measure of model accuracy. Plane waves, depending on time like four-cycle sinusoidal bursts of varying central frequency (20--100 kHz), are numerically propagated through a computed-tomography-based anatomy model using both solvers. The sound is ``recorded'' in front of the rostrum and at the right inner-ear locations for comparison. We successfully cross-validate both solvers on high-fidelity High-Performance Computing (HPC) clusters. We find that the stability of results from both solvers grows as the corresponding spatial resolution is refined. At their highest resolutions, the two methods show excellent agreement, with normalized correlation exceeding 0.99 across the entire 20--100 kHz frequency range. Together, our results provide a validated HPC-simulation framework for wave propagation in biological media, with broader implications, e.g., for biosonar research, auditory biomechanics, and medical ultrasound.