Efficient Angle Selection for Coherent Plane Wave Compounding

Ultrasound imaging based on multiple steered plane-wave emissions and coherent compounding can achieve very high frame rates, thus enabling the user to obtain valuable information about blood flow or tissue motion characteristics. After emitting a plane wave at some angle, a transducer array records returning echoes that are subsequently processed to form an individual image dataset. Several plane-wave emissions at different angles yield multiple image datasets that can be coherently compounded to improve the final image quality. We propose an efficient method for selecting a reduced subset of plane-wave emission angles, which lowers the data acquisition cost while still producing good-quality images. Our angle-selection scheme relies on a similarity-driven recursive search within the user-specified angular range.