k-Wave team releases new toolbox version in collaboration with UCL’s RSE group

著者 Mike Croucher, March 12, 2026

36 ビュー (過去 30 日間) | 0 いいね | 0 コメント

k-Wave is a MATLAB community toolbox with a track record that includes over 2,500 citations on Google Scholar and over 7,600 downloads on File Exchange. It is built for the "time-domain simulation of acoustic wave fields" and was recently highlighted as a Pick of the Week.

In December, release v1.4.1 was published on GitHub. The release included quality and maintainability enhancements supported by a new code contributor, Stella Prins, who is a Research Software Engineer (RSE) at University College London (UCL)'s Advanced Research Computing Centre where she co-leads the Life Sciences Collaborations team. 

Her contributions in 2025 spanned several software engineering aspects, including the addition of continuous integration (CI), fixing several bugs, and updating date/time handling to use datetime. 

The MATLAB Community Toolbox Program sponsored these contributions, and is happy to see them now integrated into a release ready for k-Wave users. 

Before I joined MathWorks, I was a Research Software Engineer myself and co-founded the RSE group at University of Sheffield. As such, I am really happy to be collaborating with the community again via the MATLAB Community Toolbox Program on the development of open-source MATLAB toolboxes such as k-Wave. 

I caught up with Stella late last year to discuss her work on the k-Wave project.

Had you used MATLAB before this project?

Yes, a lot. MATLAB has a special place in my heart because it was the first programming language I ever used. I studied psychology as a bachelor degree at Utrecht University in the Netherlands.

Even in my first year, I was already fascinated by research. We used MATLAB for conducting experiments and also used it for EEG processing, fMRI and so on. In the final year of my bachelor degree, I picked the six month project that was the most programming heavy. So for six months I was programming away in MATLAB and I have really good memories.

I also used it alongside other languages such as R and Python throughout my PhD and postdoc career.

What was one of the things you learned about MATLAB during this project?

One of the biggest things I did as part of this project was set up the Continuous Integration (CI), something I hadn't done before in MATLAB but it was pretty straightforward. There's now a GitHub actions workflow for CI of unit tests in k-wave as a result of this work.

The RSE group at UCL was one of the first in the world and a model for many of the groups that followed. It has been great working with you.

Thanks. We are strong proponents of open source software in research and so it's really great to see MathWorks supporting projects like this more. I'm looking forward to the next one.