Mr imaging using partial echo acquisition

Abstract

The invention relates to a method of MR imaging of an object (10) placed in an examination volume of an MR system (1). It is an object of the invention to provide a method that enables improved MR imaging using partial echo acquisition. The method of the invention comprises the steps of: subjecting the object (10) to an imaging sequence comprising a series of RF excitations, wherein an echo signal is generated in the presence of a readout magnetic field gradient in each repetition time interval between successive RF excitations, wherein phase-encoding magnetic field gradients (P, S) are switched in each repetition time interval to sample a pre-defined region of k-space; acquiring the echo signals from the object (10) as partial echoes with different readout polarities, each echo signal being associated with either a first direction of the readout magnetic field gradient or a second direction of the readout magnetic field gradient which is opposite to the first direction, wherein the echo signals associated with the first and/or the second direction sample k-space sparsely in at least one phase-encoding direction (P, S); and reconstructing an MR image from the acquired echo signals. Furthermore, the invention proposes to apply a shift in k-space in the readout direction to the acquired echo signal data and to reconstruct an intermediate MR image for each of a number of different shift values, wherein a final MR image is computed from these intermediate MR images by selecting, for each voxel of the final MR image, the voxel value with the maximum intensity from the set of intermediate MR images at the respective voxel position. Signal loss caused by phase variations of the acquired partial echo signals can be avoided in this way. Moreover, the invention relates to an MR system (1) and to a computer program to be run on an MR system (1).

Dependencies are inferred from the claim text.