Patent ID: 7176687

Claim:
A method for acquiring magnetic resonance imaging data of at least a portion of a body placed in a stationary and substantially homogeneous main magnetic field, the method comprising the following steps: a) subjecting said portion of a body to a sequence of at least one RF pulse and at least one magnetic field gradient pulse; b) applying one or more refocusing pulses to generate one or more spin echo signals in said portion; c) measuring said spin echo signals in order to acquire magnetic resonance imaging data for reconstructing at least one magnetic resonance image from said acquired magnetic resonance imaging data; d) generating an additional spin echo by subjecting said portion to at least one further refocusing RF pulse and/or magnetic field gradient pulse; e) subjecting said portion to a RF drive pulse at the time of said additional spin echo, which RF drive pulse is selected such that nuclear magnetization at the time of said additional spin echo is transformed into negative longitudinal magnetization; f) allowing the negative longitudinal magnetization to recover to positive longitudinal magnetization without application of RF drive pulses during a recovery period for optimizing the image contrast between tissues with different values of T1 the duration of said recovery period being selected such that it is larger than the shortest T1; g) repeating steps a) to f) with the pulse sequence of step a) beginning after the recovery period in order to incorporate the optimized T1 contrast from step f) into the acquired magnetic resonance imaging data.