k-Wave: A MATLAB toolbox for the time-domain simulation of acoustic wave fields

Posted by Mike Croucher, September 30, 2025

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Mike's pick this week is k-Wave by Bradley Treeby and Ben Cox.

There is no doubt that k-Wave has been very impactful in its field. The original 2010 paper describing it has been cited 2617 times at the time of writing according to google scholar and I'm convinced that it has been used a lot more than that! One thing I learned during my years as a Research Software Engineer is that software is often not cited anywhere near as often as it should.

So what does it do?

From the description on File Exchange: "k-Wave is an open source MATLAB toolbox designed for the time-domain simulation of propagating acoustic waves in 1D, 2D, or 3D. The toolbox has a wide range of functionality, but at its heart is an advanced numerical model that can account for both linear and nonlinear wave propagation, an arbitrary distribution of heterogeneous material parameters, and power law acoustic absorption."

There is extensive documentation that gets installed into your MATLAB alongside the toolbox and I was up and running my first simulation within a couple of minutes of installing it.

Available on GitHub and File Exchange, k-Wave is a great example of a long-running MATLAB Community Toolbox that has attracted many users over the years.