Magnetic resonance imaging apparatus

Abstract

A magnetic resonance imaging apparatus based on a multi-echo imaging scheme and a multi-slice imaging scheme, is arranged to acquire all components of an echo signal which corresponds to low-frequency components in an image which is small in the absolute value of the phase encoding amount in a sufficient time to ensure a desired signal-to-noise ratio and to acquire echo signals which correspond to high-frequency components in the image which are large in the absolute value of the phase encoding amount in acquisition times shorter than that time to ensure a desired signal-to-noise ratio. The signal acquisition time can be reduced by shortening the time interval at which the 180.degree. pulses are generated. Due to reducing the signal acquisition time, parts of the echo signal in the read direction are not acquired. The components which have not been acquired are estimated by use of complex conjugate data of acquired data or mere 0 values for image reconstruction. Thereby, image data acquisition time for one slice can be reduced to reserve the number of multi-slice acquisitions without degrading the signal-to-noise ratio in the image.

Dependencies are inferred from the claim text.