The invention relates to an apparatus for flow estimation using synthetic
aperture imaging. The method uses a Synthetic Transmit Aperture, but
unlike previous approaches a new frame is created after every pulse
emission. In receive mode parallel beam forming is implemented. The beam
formed RF data is added to the previously created RF lines obtained by
the same transmit sequence. The apparatus comprises a pulser (1) to
generate a pulsed voltage signal, that is fed to the emit beam former
(2). The emit beam former (2) is connected to the emitting transducer
array (3). The ultrasound is reflected by the object (4) and received by
the elements of the transducer array (5). All of these signals are then
combined in the beam processor (6) to focus all of the beams in the image
in both transmit and receive mode and the simultaneously focused signals
are used for updating the image in the processor (7). The estimation
processor (8) to correlate the individual measurements to obtain the
displacement between high-resolution images and thereby determine the
velocity.