An efficient method for dynamic magnetic resonance imaging.

Many magnetic resonance imaging applications require the acquisition of a time series of images. In conventional Fourier transform based imaging methods, each of these images is acquired independently so that the temporal resolution possible is limited by the number of spatial encodings (or data points in the Fourier space) collected, or one has to sacrifice spatial resolution for temporal resolution. Here, a generalized series based imaging technique is proposed to address this problem. This technique makes use of the fact that, in most time-sequential imaging problems, the high-resolution image morphology does not change from one image to another, and it improves imaging efficiency (and temporal resolution) over the conventional Fourier imaging methods by eliminating the repeated encodings of this stationary information. Additional advantages of the proposed imaging technique include a reduced number of radio frequency (RF) pulses for data collection, and thus lower RF power deposition. This method should prove useful for a variety of dynamic imaging applications, including dynamic studies of contrast agents and functional brain imaging.