Data-Driven Sensor Array Subsampling for Plane-Wave Ultrasound Imaging

Ultrafast plane-wave ultrasound imaging offers very high frame rates but entails large volumes of backscattered data collected by a sensor array over multiple plane-wave emissions at different angles. We propose a simple method for reducing the total amount of sampled data (subject to subsequent beamforming and coherent compounding). First, we acquire the zeroangle data in full, and then perform deterministic subsampling of the remaining nonzero-angle data. Our subsampling patterns are angle-specific and derived based on the zero-angle data.