Efficient similarity-driven emission angle selection for coherent plane-wave compounding
Date
2018-10-09
Authors
Akbar, Haroon Ali
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Abstract
Typical ultrafast plane-wave ultrasound imaging involves: 1) insonifying the medium with several plane-wave pulses emitted at different angles by a linear transducer array, 2) sampling the returning echo signals, after each plane-wave emission, with the same transducer array, 3) beamforming the recorded angle-specific raw data frames, and 4) compounding the beamformed data frames over all angles to form a final image. This thesis attempts to address the following question: Given a set of available plane-wave emission angles, which ones should we select for acquisition (i.e., which angle-specific raw data frames should we sample), to achieve adequate image quality at low cost associated with both sampling and computation?
We propose a simple similarity-driven angle selection scheme and evaluate its several variants that rely on user-specified similarity measurement thresholds guiding the recursive angle selection process. Our results show that the proposed scheme has a low
computational overhead and can yield significant savings in terms of the amount of sampled raw data.
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Keywords
Similarity - Driven Angle Selection Using Beamformed Data (SASB), Similarity - Driven Angle Selection Using Raw Data (SASR), Ultrasound Image Quality, Delay - and - Sum (DAS) Beamforming, Coherent Plane - Wave Compounding (CPWC)