[Front cover] IEEE Transactions on Ultrasonics, Ferroelectrics, and Frequency Control - June 2005 Vol. 52 No. 6

In-vivo Synthetic Aperture Flow image of the Carotid Artery: the front cover page shows an in-vivo color flow image of the blood velocity in the carotid artery in the diastolic phase from a 29-year old male. A 64 element, 7 MHz linear array transducer was used in combination with an experimental ultrasound scanner. The whole image is acquired in 24 pulse emissions using a synthetic aperture technique, where spherical ultrasound pulses are emitted from four different places on the aperture. These four emissions are repeated 6 times to yield the 24 emissions, and the B-mode image is beamformed from the first 4 emissions to create a high resolution image. A high resolution image can be created after each emissions after the fourth emission, and these data are used in a cross-correlation estimator to find the velocity along the focused beam directions. The color scale on the right indicates the magnitude of the velocity. Images courtesy of Svetoslav Ivanov Nikolov and Jorgen Arendt Jensen, Technical University of Denmark, Orsted DTU, Lyngby, Denmark. See related article: S.I. Nikolov and J. A. Jensen, "In-vivo synthetic aperture flow imaging in medical ultrasound," IEEE Trans. Ultrason., Ferroelect., Freq. Contr., vol. 50, no. 7, pp. 848-856, Jul. 2003.