Patent ID: 9636086
Date: 2017-05-02
CPC Classifications: A61B,G01P,G01S

Claim:
1. An ultrasound imaging system, comprising: a transducer array, including a two-dimensional array of transducer elements configured to transmit an ultrasound signal and receive echoes; transmit circuitry configured to control the transducer array to transmit the ultrasound signal so as to traverse a field of view; receive circuitry configured to receive a two dimensional set of echoes produced in response to the ultrasound signal traversing structure in the field of view, wherein the structure includes flowing structure; a beamformer with only four sub-beamformers, which concurrently beamform scanlines, and each of the sub-beamformers beamforms one scanline for a total of four scanlines, wherein the beamformer is configured to beamform the echoes, producing at least a pair of I/Q lines in a depth/elevation plane and separated by a first angle and a pair of I/Q lines in a depth/transverse plane and separated by a second angle for a total of two pairs of I/Q lines, wherein each line of the two pairs of I/Q lines is one of the four scanlines; and a processor configured to separately determine a depth velocity component, a transverse velocity component and an elevation velocity component independent of each other, wherein the processor determines the depth, transverse and elevation velocity components from a same transmitted ultrasound signal and a same received set of two dimensional echoes, and determines the elevation velocity component from the pair of I/Q lines in a depth/elevation plane, the transverse velocity component from the pair of I/Q lines in a depth/transverse plane, and the depth velocity component from at least one of the pairs of I/Q lines in the depth/elevation plane or the depth/transverse plane, wherein the processor determines the elevation velocity component from: where λ y is an elevation wavelength, T prf is a time between two ultrasound pulses, k is a lag, and R 1 (k) and R 2 (k) are complex lag k autocorrelation values.