Advanced Ultrafast Ultrasound Imaging

This thesis is focused on developing novel ultrasound imaging techniques suitable for automated breast volume ultrasound scanning in order to improve breast cancer’s early detection and diagnosis. Although automated breast volume ultrasound has shown its evident advantages over hand-held scanning, a series of limitations, e.g. unsatisfactory B-mode image quality, time-consuming scanning process, and absence of other functional modes, severely hinder its broadscale application. To accelerate the time-consuming scanning process, plane-wave ultrasound can be employed to replace the conventional focused ultrasound, albeit at cost of degraded image quality. For this purpose, the first part of this thesis’s work is about investigating, optimizing, and applying Fourier-domain image reconstruction methods for plane-wave ultrasound to improve image quality. The second part is devoted to developing and validating a 3D Doppler technique that is suitable for automated breast ultrasound.