Patent ID: 7355407

Claim:
A method of magnetic resonance imaging of an object comprising the steps of: (a) placing the object in a magnetic bias field and applying radio-frequency (RF) excitation to the object to excite nuclear spins in the object; and then (b) applying a first motion-probing magnetic field gradient pattern to the object; and then (c) applying at least one radio-frequency (RF) refocusing pulse to the object to refocus the excited nuclear spins; and then (d) applying a second motion-probing magnetic field gradient pattern to the object; and then (e) applying an imaging process to spatial-encode and record a magnetic resonance signal from the object for producing a magnetic resonance image of the object; and (f) repeating steps (b) to (e) as many times as required by the imaging process to produce the magnetic resonance image of the object; wherein the second motion-probing magnetic field gradient pattern is symmetrical with respect to the first motion-probing magnetic field gradient pattern, and the first and second magnetic field gradient patterns follow a template characterized by a skew parameter (Îµ), and wherein the first and second motion-probing magnetic field gradient patterns are selected for single-scan isotropic diffusion weighting by calculating in real time an optimum value of the skew parameter (Îµ) as a function of determined values of other parameters of the imaging sequence of steps (b) to (e).