Patent ID: 8394027

Claim:
A method for two-dimensional flow imaging in medical diagnostic ultrasound, the method comprising: acquiring flow data comprising velocity, energy, or variance, the flow data representing a plurality of different planes around and including a first plane of an object, the different planes including the first plane comprising scan planes; determining flow values comprising velocity, energy, or variance, the flow values determined for the first plane as a function of the flow data for the plurality of different planes, wherein determining the flow values comprises calculating, for each of a plurality of locations in the first plane and not for the other planes of the plurality of different planes, a statistic from the flow data for a surrounding three-dimensional region and determining the flow value for each of the locations as a function of the respective statistic, the statistic for velocity, energy, or variance being of the velocities, energies, or variances, respectively, for the surrounding three-dimensional region based on a kernel centered at each location in the first plane without placement of the kernel as centered on the other planes of the plurality of different planes; and generating a flow image representing flow in a two-dimensional region corresponding to the first plane, the flow image being a function of the flow values and being a two-dimensional image of the two-dimensional region without displaying flow values or flow data for the other planes of the plurality of different planes.