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Simulations of three dimensional ultrasound propagation in heterogeneousmedia are computationally intensive due to the constraints arising from thelarge size of the domain, which is on the order of hundreds of wavelengths, andthe small size of scatterers, which are much smaller than a wavelength.Consequently, three dimensional ultrasound imaging simulations are currentlybased on models that simplify the propagation physics. Here the full threedimensional wave physics is simulated with finite differences to generateultrasound images of the human body based directly on the first principles ofpropagation and backscattering. The Visible Human project, a 3D data set of thehuman body that was generated with photographs of 0.33 mm cryosections, isconverted into 3D acoustical maps. A full-wave nonlinear acoustic simulationtool is used to propagate ultrasound into the liver with a 2D intercostalultrasound array in a $93 \times 39 \times 22$ mm domain with $6\times10^8$points. Imaging metrics, based on the beamplots, root-mean-square phaseaberration, spatial coherence lengths, and contrast-to-noise ratio are used tocharacterize the image quality. It is shown that the harmonic image quality isbetter than the fundamental image quality due, in part, to a narrower beamprofile. The root-mean-square estimate of aberration after propagation throughthe simulated body wall is shown to be low (23.4 ns), consistently withprevious reports of aberration measured experimentally in a human body wall.The spatial coherence measured at the transducer surface indicates that atransducer array element size of $<0.81 \lambda$ would be required to fullysample the acoustic field. These simulated three dimensional ultrasound imagesbased directly on propagation physics provide a platform to investigate thesources of image degradation in three dimensions (included in Part II).

Ultrasound imaging of the human body with three dimensional full-wave nonlinear acoustics. Part 1: simulations methods