Patent ID: 7557576

Claim:
A method of magnetic resonance imaging, the method comprising: simultaneously exciting two or more slices offset from one another, said slices taken along a direction of an essentially constant magnetic field in which a subject is placed, with respective phase-encoding gradient signals having different initial relative phase values; repeating, at least once, the excitation of the slices with the phase-encoding gradient signals, but changing the phase of each phase-encoding gradient signal by a phase change value at each repetition; for each excitation of the slices, receiving an RF signal emitted from each slice to create a first image data set for each slice; transforming the first image data set for each slice to reconstruct the image data into separate image data sets; for each slice in each excitation, replacing at least one of the separate image data sets with null values; inverse transforming the first image data sets and the separate image data sets; and combining the inversed transformed data sets of each slice to create images respectively representing the slices.