Akbar, Haroon Ali2018-10-092018-10-0920182018-10-09http://hdl.handle.net/1828/10141Typical 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.enAvailable to the World Wide WebSimilarity - Driven Angle Selection Using Beamformed Data (SASB)Similarity - Driven Angle Selection Using Raw Data (SASR)Ultrasound Image QualityDelay - and - Sum (DAS) BeamformingCoherent Plane - Wave Compounding (CPWC)Thesis