Patent ID: 8792961

Claim:
Method to display a representation of a temperature in a magnetic resonance (MR) image of an examination subject, comprising the steps of: operating an MR data acquisition unit according to an MR data acquisition pulse sequence, while the examination subject is situated in a basic magnetic field B 0 in the data acquisition unit, wherein nuclei in the examination subject are excited at a resonance frequency and first echo signals from the excited nuclei are detected after a first echo time TE 1 in said sequence and second echo signals from the excited nuclei are detected after a second echo time TE 2 in said sequence that is longer than TE 1 ; in a processor, generating a first raw MR data set in which said first echo signals are represented and generating at least one second raw MR data set in which said second echo signals are represented, thereby producing at least two raw MR data sets, each of said at least two raw MR data sets comprising magnitude information, and phase information φ, and said phase information φ in each of said at least two raw MR data sets having a relation to temperature T of the examination subject that is dependent on the respective echo time during which the respective echo signals were acquired that are represented in the at least two raw MR data sets, according to φ=γB 0 TEαT, wherein φ is φ 1 or φ 2 , y is the gyromagnetic ration for said nuclei, TE is TE 1 or TE 2 , and α is the dependency of T on the resonance frequency of the nuclei; in a processor, generating a magnitude image data set from the at least two raw MR data sets by averaging the magnitude information in the at least two raw MR data sets; in said processor, generating a phase image data set from the phase information φ contained in the at least two raw MR data sets, by weighting respective phase information φ 1 and φ 2 in the at least two raw MR data sets, as φ 1 =γB 0 TE 1 αT and φ 2 =γB 0 TE 2 αT and averaging the respectively weighted phase information φ 1 and φ 2 contained in the at least two raw MR data sets; and from said processor, displaying an image of the examination subject formed from said magnitude image data set and said phase image data set, with said temperature T being represented in the displayed image by the phase information in the phase image data set obtained by said weighting and said averaging.