Patent ID: 7782058

Claim:
An MRI apparatus comprising: a magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) system having a plurality of gradient coils positioned about a bore of a magnet, and an RF transceiver system and an RF switch controlled by a pulse module to transmit RF signals to an RF coil assembly comprising at least one RF transmit coil and comprising multiple coils to acquire MR images; and a computer usable medium having computer code therein, said computer code programmed to: excite multiple pencil regions by said RF signals using an under-sampled echo-planar excitation trajectory; acquire MR signals simultaneously on the multiple channels of the RF coil assembly; separate contributions to the MR signals from the various multiple pencil regions by use of parallel imaging reconstruction; acquire a sensitivity map for each of the multiple coils; and unwrap contributions from excited pencil regions on each of the multiple coils from respective sensitivity maps.