Nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) multi-slice imaging homogeneous preparation encoding (HoPE)

In a nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) multi-slice complete image reconstruction method for recording signals from N slices (N>1) from an object wherein:

• m (m>1) repetition steps with different spatial encoding are acquired for each of the N slices such that after termination of the sequence a complete data set for image reconstruction is available,
• magnetization preparation is applied in the form of chemical shift selective saturation pulses,
• the magnetization preparation is applied P times (1≦P<N) in each repetition step in order to optimally saturate selected spins of one of the N slices in the object which results in perfect saturation only in one of the signals from one particular slice after each saturation pulse whereas from other slices are sub-optimally saturated, the improvement comprising:
• permuting a temporal sequence of the saturation pulses and/or a sequence of the acquisition of the differently spatially encoded signals of the individual slices whereby the allocation of spatial encoding steps to the differently spatially encoded signals of the individual slices is performed such that identical spatial encoding steps for each slice are acquired at identical delay times after the respective magnetization preparation pulses after termination of the m repetition steps, such that identical spatial encoding steps for each slice show identical saturation and therefore the saturation behavior is identical for all slices.