Ultrasound (US) imaging is a widely used modality since it is non-invasive, safe, portable and cost-effective. Clinical and pre-clinical imaging are two applications of this modality based on the frequency of operation. The advent of array transducer technology over the last two decades has contributed to significant improvement in the state-of-the-art in clinical imaging (center frequency~1-10 MHz). However, emergent healthcare demand of obtaining better quality images at higher frame rates, without increasing the system hardware complexity, is an active research interest. Contrary to clinical imaging, pre-clinical imaging (center frequency >20 MHz) is still in its infancy due to the challenges in manufacturing an array transducer having thin and small sized active elements. The current practice of mechanical articulation of a single US transducer element yields considerably limited image quality compared to imaging at clinical frequency. Beamforming, being one of the most important components of US scanner, dictates the final reconstructed image quality. Recently, a non-linear beamformer called F DMAS (Filtered Delay Multiply and Sum) and few variants of it were proposed and were shown to improve the image resolution compared to state-of-the-art linear beamformers like DAS (Delay and Sum). However, they are limited in terms of Contrast to Noise Ratio (CNR) compared to DAS. Apodization, which is a crucial stage in beamforming can reduce the level of side lobes, thereby, improve the contrast and CNR and hence is widely used in DAS. Surprisingly, apodization techniques have not been developed for these non-linear beamformers. It is hypothesized that development of novel non-linear beamformers by incorporating apodization can improve the state-of-the-art in clinical imaging. It is also hypothesized that integrating the developed beamformers with novel acquisition schemes, like the minimum-redundancy synthetic aperture approach using only two elements, for pre-clinical imaging can improve the image quality considerably compared to the state-of-the-art without the need for multi-element transducer arrays. The developed methods and preliminary results from simulations and experiments on tissue-mimicking phantoms for clinical imaging will be shared. Also, the progress and plans towards experimental validation of the developed methods for imaging at high-frequency (20 MHz) will be presented.