Patent ID: 7688068

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 to acquire MR images; and a computer comprising a computer readable medium programmed to: acquire undersampled MR data for a plurality of k-space locations that is less than an entirety of a k-space grid, wherein the acquired undersampled MR data is acquired in a clustered incoherent pattern within k-space; synthesize unacquired MR data by way of a parallel imaging technique for a portion of k-space locations at which MR data was not acquired; and apply a compressed sensing reconstruction technique to generate a reconstructed image from the acquired undersampled MR data and the synthesized unacquired MR data.