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).