Magnetic resonance imaging method and device

A Magnetic Resonance Imaging method comprising

• an excitation and acquisition step, in which the body under examination is permeated by a static magnetic field, and in which excitation sequences comprising trains of radio-frequency pulses are applied to the body under examination by application of phase and frequency encoding gradients and magnetic resonance signals are received from the body under examination;
• an image reconstruction step, in which said received magnetic resonance signals are processed for generating images by phase and frequency decoding, the images being acquired along section planes or slices of the body under examination, known as acquisition slices;
• wherein a first set of magnetic resonance signals corresponding to predetermined phase-encoding gradients and at least one second set of received magnetic resonance signals, corresponding to further predetermined phase-encoding gradients, are acquired from the body under examination, using multi-echo sequences, such that echoes with the same echo index are assigned to different phase-encoding gradients,
• said first set and said at least one second set being entered into at least two corresponding k-space matrices, and the at least two k-space matrices being combined into a single k-space matrix from which an image is generated,
• wherein
• each of the said at least two k-space matrices is incompletely filled such that, for the same phase encoding gradient, a first matrix of the matrices contains the higher-intensity received signals, and a second matrix of the matrices contains no signal at the positions in the second matrix corresponding to the position of the higher intensity received signals in the first matrix, and said single k-space matrix is generated by taking a partial average, where subsets of received signals corresponding to the same phase encoding gradients of the different sets of received signals are defined, and in at least one subset the received signals that correspond to the same phase encoding gradient of the different sets of received signals are not averaged or are averaged a smaller number of times, whereas in at least one further subset they are averaged a greater number of times and wherein a different multiplication factor is applied to each received signal to obtain a substantially constant noise for all received signals, once said partial average is taken.