Patent ID: 8922210

Claim:
A method of generating a magnetic resonance (MR) image of a tissue, said method comprising: acquiring MR signals at undersampled q-space locations for a plurality of q-space locations that is less than an entirety of the q-space locations, wherein the acquired signal at the q-space locations represents the three-dimensional displacement distribution of the spins in the imaging voxel; synthesizing q-space encodings using a compressed sensing technique for a portion of q-space locations at which MR signals were not acquired; combining the acquired q-space encodings and the synthesized q-space encodings to generate a set of q-space encodings that are evenly distributed in q-space; using the set of q-space encodings to generate a function that represents a distribution of the set of q-space encodings; and generating an image of the tissue based on at least a portion of the generated function; further comprising, inducing a population of polarized spins in the tissue to produce a set of nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) signals, wherein the signals comprise a set of non-uniformly distributed encodings to measure the three-dimensional displacement probability distribution function of the spins in the tissue.